Favorite Tech Museums

Summary

Fav tech museums I love technology history because it brings me both advice and encouragement: stories of people solving problems despite constraints much bigger than mine, stories of flawed inventions and flawed inventors, stories of oddities that can inform and inspire. Sometimes the blueprints for the best version of the future already exist in the past, but only if you do some spelunking first, and remixing second. Those who read history will be able to repeat it, but under better circumstances, or more stellar execution. Technology history means visiting tech museums, and I have been doing that for decades now. I wanted to reflect on why I love some of them more than the others, so I made this photo essay: six best tech museums I’ve been to, 16 great ones… and, at the end, three not-as-positive examples. I wrote it mostly for myself to think about what museums mean for me, but perhaps you will find something in it, too. I liked more museums than presented here, of course. And I have a lot more to visit (please let me know if you have suggestions!). But of the ones I have been to, these are the ones that deserve a spotlight. The best tech museums that I’ve been to National Railway Museum Park / Taipei Railway Workshop Taiwan (the site near Songshan Park) / Visited in 2025 / nrm.gov.tw This place blew me away. It’s a newish museum, but hosted in an old, massive railway workshop building complex, so you know the space itself is going to be part of the story – locomotives, huge industrial cranes that lift them around, various bits and pieces of preserved machinery. I generally love this kind of a vibe (even the smell of it all) and find it, in a way, breathtaking. Part of me would choose to live here in an instant. But, there are more things that make this museum special. A snippet of one of the videos The production value is impeccable and it seems to be spent on things that matter. For example, there are absolutely magnificent videos here of men restoring old loc...