René Rondeau bought his first antique phonograph when he was twelve years old in 1961. Sixty-five years later, he is still putting them on the web.
Visit René Rondeau’s Antique Phonograph and Photography Site
The homepage was updated in June 2026, which immediately puts it in a special class of Ancient Web sites: not merely surviving, but still being tended by the person whose obsession created it.
Rondeau calls antique phonographs an all-consuming passion. The site contains his online phonograph museum, but the subject spreads naturally into other 19th-century technologies.
Tinfoil, wet plates, and early Kodaks
There is material on Edison’s phonographs, authentic recording tinfoil, early dealers, Edison at the Eiffel Tower, historical oddities, and individual machines from the collection.
Then the site changes gears into wet-plate collodion photography.
Rondeau practices the photographic process used during the 1850s through roughly 1880 and explains how ambrotypes and tintypes are made. A separate camera collection includes Kodak equipment reaching back to the first Kodak camera from 1888.
That combination matters because the site is not built from copied encyclopedia summaries. It comes from someone who actually collects and uses the machinery.
The web is very good at storing specifications. It is less good at retaining the accumulated judgment of somebody who has handled the object for decades.
Rondeau also writes about downsizing his collection. His view is that collectors are temporary caretakers rather than permanent owners. That is an unusually sensible philosophy for physical artifacts, and it applies just as well to websites. Eventually somebody has to decide whether the information keeps moving forward or disappears with the person who gathered it.
For a webmaster, this is another example of a personal site becoming a museum without needing an institution to declare it one.
This site is one stop from CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research corpus.
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The phonographs are old. The curiosity is not.