A retired geneticist built an online museum of electrical plugs
A man with the delightful name of Oof Oud spent his career studying DNA and chromosomes at the University of Amsterdam. Then he retired and built the Museum of Plugs and Sockets — a sprawling website cataloging over a thousand electrical plugs and sockets from more than 25 countries.
The collection started in the early 1990s when a university technician found a batch of old three-phase plugs during a building relocation and handed them to Oud instead of tossing them. That act of rescue grew into an obsession with what Oud calls “the diversity of incompatible systems” — the fact that the world never agreed on how to plug in a lamp.
The site is organized with a completist’s care. Domestic plugs from Argentina to South Africa. Heavy-duty three-phase connectors rated up to 480 volts. Vintage Bakelite specimens from 1920s Germany. An entire page of mystery plugs the curator can’t identify, including one with a red dot whose purpose nobody has figured out. More than 90 donors from around the world have shipped items to Oud in Culemborg, Netherlands, and the museum reimburses their postage — though no one funds the site itself.
There’s no gift shop (Oud’s homepage notes that “mails regarding quotations, orders and delivery times remain unanswered!”) and no institutional backing. Just a retired scientist, a thousand plugs, and the conviction that these mundane little objects deserve a proper archive.
Historians of the future will sing songs of praise for the people who create these niche archives and collections. Daily life from the bottom up, as it were.
What a cool hobby.