InfoAge Science & History Museums in Wall Township, New Jersey, is a cluster of nearly two dozen small museums packed into a former Marconi wireless station and Army research base — the same patch of ground where scientists bounced the first radar signal off the moon in 1946. It’s open just three days a week, admission is cheap, and it’s one of the strangest, most fact-dense afternoons you can spend in Monmouth County.
What Exactly Is InfoAge?
Calling InfoAge a “museum” undersells it a little. It’s really a museum of museums. InfoAge has evolved into a consortium of 20 science and history museums and exhibits that serve as a focal point for the preservation and interpretation of New Jersey’s rich technology and military history. You wander from building to building across a campus that is located at the former Marconi Transmission Station and Camp Evans National Landmark, and has been designated New Jersey’s World War II Living Memorial.
The whole operation is run largely by volunteers, many of whom are retired engineers, ham radio operators, and military history buffs who clearly love this stuff. That energy comes through. This isn’t a slick corporate museum experience — it’s closer to visiting someone’s incredibly well-organized, slightly obsessive collection, except the collection fills sixteen buildings.
The Day Camp Evans Touched the Moon
Here’s the part that makes InfoAge genuinely remarkable, not just quirky. On a January morning just after World War II ended, this exact property became the birthplace of space-age communication.
Around noon on January 10, 1946, a powerful pulse of radio waves shot skyward from a massive radar installation at Camp Evans, tightly focused and aimed at a pale orb just rising above the eastern horizon — the Moon. The experiment had a name: Project Diana, which marked the beginning of radar astronomy, named after the Roman goddess of the Moon.
The team didn’t have purpose-built equipment for talking to outer space — nobody did yet. Instead, the team modified existing radar equipment already available at Camp Evans, using a heavily modified SCR-271 radar set as their transmitter. When the signal finally came back, the response took 2.5 seconds — the amount of time it takes to go from Earth to the Moon and back at the speed of light. Mathematician Walter McAfee, a Camp Evans scientist, had done the calculations that made the experiment possible — he made the required mathematical calculations.
The implications went well beyond a cool party trick. Project Diana demonstrated the feasibility of using the Moon as a passive reflector to transmit radio signals from one point on the Earth to the other, around the curve of the Earth. It’s widely considered the opening act of the Space Race, and the same Diana site later did double duty during the Cold War: equipment located at Camp Evans, specifically at the Diana Site, was one of the first to detect the ‘beep-beep-beep’ of Sputnik. You can still stand on that ground today.
Before NASA, There Was Marconi
The moon-bounce story is the headline, but Camp Evans was already historically loaded decades before Project Diana existed. Marconi’s company acquired the farmland here in 1912, and his staff built several towers to receive trans-Atlantic wireless messages. The centerpiece building still standing is the so-called Marconi Hotel, and it wasn’t built for guests in the tourist sense — the 1914 building was constructed as a 45-bedroom hotel for Marconi employees who worked in shifts to man the station’s 24-hour service day.
Even Edwin Armstrong, the inventor behind FM radio, tested breakthrough technology here, and Camp Evans drew enough attention over the decades that Senator Joseph McCarthy, in 1954, demanded to know more about what was going on in Camp Evans’ secret radar facility. This was never just a sleepy army outpost. It was a place where the federal government kept reinventing how the world communicates, generation after generation, almost by accident.
What You’ll Actually See When You Walk Through
Once the Army shut the base down, InfoAge inherited a sprawling, slightly chaotic collection of individual museums, each run by its own small nonprofit or club. A visitor review sums up the variety pretty well: the complex includes a small New Jersey Shipwreck Museum, World War I and World War II dioramas, the history of radio, TV and telephone communications, and the history and development of computers with many operating examples — plus a Military Vehicle Museum housing one of the world’s largest collections of rare and unique military vehicles.
The WWII section leans hands-on. The World War II Tactical Communications Museum highlights army field radio, wireline, radio relay, and tactical message encryption equipment, and visitors are encouraged to find the secret radio hidden in a canteen within the exhibit. There’s also the Radio Technology Museum, run by the New Jersey Antique Radio Club, which doubles as home to the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame — the museum traces the development of radio from before spark to beyond cellphones, with many sets on display lovingly restored to operating condition.
If you’re into vintage tech specifically, keep an eye on the calendar. InfoAge hosts the Vintage Computer Festival East, a three-day program featuring the museum, classes, talks, and dozens of interactive vintage computing exhibits each spring, drawing collectors from well outside New Jersey. And if haunted history is more your speed, the grounds get repurposed every October into the “Camp Evans Base of Terror,” a volunteer-run haunted walk built around the base’s own unsettling, half-declassified past.
Planning Your Visit
This is the part that trips people up, so pay attention: InfoAge is not a daily-open attraction. Across multiple current listings, the museum runs Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday from 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm, and it’s closed the rest of the week. Showing up on a random Tuesday afternoon will get you a parking lot and a locked door.
Admission is refreshingly affordable for how much ground you’ll cover. Recent pricing lists it at $15 for ages 13 and older, $10 for ages 5 to 12, free for ages 0 to 4, $8 for military, and $12 for seniors, though individual museum rooms sometimes welcome additional donations, and prices can shift for special events, so it’s worth a quick check of infoage.org before you drive out. The address is 2201 Marconi Road, Wall, NJ, tucked just a few minutes off Route 18 and not far from the Jersey Shore beach towns, so it pairs easily with a beach day if you time it right.
Plan to spend real time here. With this many individual collections stacked into one campus, a quick drive-by won’t cut it. Budget at least two or three hours if you want to actually read the placards, talk to the volunteers, and stand for a minute at the spot where humans first said hello to the moon and heard something say hello back.
NOTE TO THE ADVENTURER: This guide is meant to spark curiosity for what lies beyond the horizon — not to serve as a guarantee. Roads fall into disrepair, buildings are torn down and rebuilt, and properties change hands; 'tis your responsibility to do your own research before setting out. Always heed local and regional law, and always respect ground that isn't your own. Take every entry here as a suggestion, not a decree. This guide's contents were gathered with the aid of artificial intelligence, and like any scout, it will from time to time lead you astray. You assume all risk in following its counsel, and neither this blog nor its author is liable for any loss, injury, or misfortune that results.
