The main tack of this paper is to pinpoint the usefulness of some of the many old instruments and documents that have been serving efficaciously at The Phonetics Institute of Strasbourg as teaching tools in experimental phonetics, since the 40s. The authors have deliberately not tried to improve the quality of these old documents, by adapting them, in order to sensitise the reader to their relevance, then and today, for understanding phonetic phenomena, however complex they may be. Indeed, when heritage scientific instruments and documents, like those that come from the past in the area of experimental phonetics, are used and interpreted appropriately, they help to underscore the findings of early phoneticians, which comprised the principles of reflection, design and creation of adapted instruments, hypothesis formulation, and empirical data, today keystones of contemporary phonetic method.