Why I do collect radios

This is a question quite interesting which for sure has a lot to do with my personal history. I would like to avoid a self psycological description as I am convinced, it will be uncorrect. I do think it is much easier trying to say to everybody that yes, I love vacuum tubes. This fact will push me to tell few fragments of my youthness. When I was a child I was always attracted by the orange ligths of televisions or radios vacuum tubes. It happened that wherever I was, relatives, parents friends houses etc etc regularly after a while I was going to ask to show radios or televisions in their property. Once that I was successful to make the devices on, despite I was a fat child, I slided  behind to check the tubes and try if possible to read the brand name....Philips, Fivre, Briman, Cifte etc. etc.
A reason for this behavior has to be addressed to my father who during the war was a quality tester of vacuum tubes for the "Regia Aereonautica". I was particularly fashinated from his descriptions. The Nickel shortage pushed to collect the so called "nichelini" a little italian coins with a very high percentage of this semi-precious metal funadamental for the grids, cathode and anode building. Another issue to demonstrate the stupidity of war: A story circulate here in Florence, some bushes specifically growing on Ophiolites (green schists which are the oceanic ridges and related to the so called tholeitic basalt, deep mantle magmas) absorb nickel and there were some attempts to burn
these bushes collecting the ashes  to obtain nickel....so ridicolous!
When I was fourteenth my Grand-father died and I got the radio which was given to my father in Monza (Milano) on 1942, by Philips. The radio was a 478 IV model. My Grand-father had basically exploited it to death as he was listening to radio hours and hours a day. The endpenthode (EBL1) was replaced by some strange "noval" tube. The power supply transformer died shortly after together with the AZ1 double wave rectifier. So I had the idea to restore the radio. The criteria I used, today it would be judged crazy....But finally the radio was on and I used years and years to listen to classic music....and finally the tubes mania ended up.....
Now I'm working in laser physics in a governement laboratory of the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale dell Ricerche).
One year and half ago we had to move all the Institute far away from downtown and relocate in the main research area outside of Florence. I was encharged to select the still working and usefulinstruments and discard and dump the others. Digging in all the mess I discovered hundreds of tubes and some beautiful instruments in really bad shape. In a sort of garbage stocking room the wonderfulel Tektronix oscilloscope the ultrafast "519" ...Well I managed to save more than possible of these and I launched the idea of a museum....Meanwhile the tube fever hit me again....I started back to collect radios after years of sleep.
Obviously I don't like to collect a radio because that particular model is precious and is the good investment to proudly show to friends....
To me the adopted technical solutions, the tube types are the "spring".
Fashinating is the history of FM. I got the wonderful and smart paper by Seeley and Avins on RCA review (1949) who invented modyfing the Foster and Seeley discriminator, the famous "Ratio Discriminator".
Today we have the Phase Lock Loop...(PLL). But this is another story.
My world was born with last heydays of tubes and I feel a special bonding to them. This I believe is the real answer to the above question.

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