In the 1950s, the Civil Air Raid Warning System was once commonplace in American life, but has since been slowly dismantled and fallen out of use. Thanks to a generous donation, many hours of hard work from our all-volunteer staff, and a lot of research, the Connections Museum in Seattle has a new exhibit giving a unique telecommunications history perspective on these systems designed to be used only in the case of a true emergency— all out attack and nuclear war.

In this video, Sarah and Claire give you a tour of what the system was when it was originally designed and installed by the Bell Telephone System, what it took to get it working here in our museum, and a little bit of perspective on the history.

Check out our store for some excellent CARW shirts! https://cottonbureau.com/people/conne...

DOCUMENTS AND LINKS
Follow us on Mastodon: https://tacobelllabs.net/@connections
Ephemera is on Claire's Archive.org page: https://archive.org/details/@108c
Thanks to Sarah for this excellent digitization of the survival plan for Pacific Northwest Bell's Kenwood Building: https://archive.org/details/bellsyste...
Our technical documentation is hosted generously at TelecomArchive.com:
https://www.telecomarchive.com/
https://telecomarchive.s3.us-east-2.a...
I've linked here to the most interesting for the general audience, but you can use the website's search functionality on the homepage to search for "Civil Air" or "Civil Defense" to find more of our recent contributions.
Details on Autovon: http://autovon.org/wp-content/uploads...

If you need help, desire a full listing, or have further questions about the documents, please email Claire at [email protected]

thanks to the JKL Museum of Telephony: https://www.jklmuseum.com/

captioning by astrid 🧡