The museum contains the research laboratory and equipment used by Édouard Branly, a physics professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris and inventor of the first widely used radioreceiver, the Branly coherer circa 1884―1886. Its collection includes a number of early devices used in wireless experiments, such as electrolytic detectors, insulated tubes filled with metal filings, a Righi oscillator, generators, electromagnets, metallic blades mounted on glass, electrical contacts, and a column of six steel balls stacked in a glass cylinder.