Telephone museums preserve artifacts that highlight the development of communication technology from solid wooden wall-mounted telephones that required operators to hand crank each call through to today’s pocket-sized touch screen cellular phones, celebrating creativity, craftsmanship and ingenuity while informing visitors.
Prior to the telephone’s invention, written correspondence limited access to information for those outside a literate population. With its widespread availability and increased convenience for communicating between different audiences, telephone communication democratized communications while altering social norms and etiquette practices.
Museum Exhibits
This museum showcases a tangible history of telecommunications, with tours available both guided and self-guided. As one of the oldest complete telephone museums west of Mississippi, it highlights both social and technical telecommunications history ranging from solid wood wall-mounted phones to cell smartphones; you’ll gain a comprehensive view of technology’s development since Alexander Graham Bell accidentally invented them all!
Modern phones might take for granted today, but when first introduced in the late 1800s they were revolutionary technology. At this museum visitors can explore this development by testing out crank phones, touching complex panel switchboards and perusing an impressive collection of novelty items.
This museum is run by a group of retired telephone employees and accredited with Museums Alberta. It offers an impressive collection of artifacts such as working Panel and Crossbar electromechanical central office switches, operator switchboards and an outside plant display featuring poles, cables, splicing equipment and tools.
Archival Collections
This collection of antique telephones and telecommunications technology is the largest in North America. Its fascinating history can be explored through interactive displays highlighting telecom themes as well as hands on programs tailored for all ages.
The museum represents a worldwide association of collectors, hobbyists, and historians dedicated to keeping communications history alive. Its archives document both the Bell System as well as its predecessors from 1876–when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone–into modern times.
Researchers visiting the Shapell Library’s reading rooms can access historical published resources (pre-1953) as well as millions of digitized archival copy materials, with audiovisual materials only being viewable on-site and cannot be borrowed out.
Workshops & Guided Tours
The Museum of Telecommunication History features fully operational pieces of telecommunication history that illustrate both social and technical significance of this breakthrough in communications. It boasts one of North America’s largest collections of telephone equipment and memorabilia including working panels and crossbar electromechanical central office step switches; antique phones and manual switchboards; displays of small town independent exchanges featuring glass insulators; outside plant displays with poles, cables and splicing tools as well as cataloged telecommunication reference materials; as well as one of its largest collections of telephone-related equipment and memorabilia!
The Museum offers many hands-on, how-it-works displays that inspire an interest in engineering and history, making it an ideal spot for Boy Scouts pursuing one of their Inventing or Engineering merit badges.
The Telephone Workshops program is a full-scale development project intended to assess the effects of a STEM learning model for children and teenagers that encourages an interest in electrical theory and engineering. Participants take an inquiry-based approach which encourages them to ‘take stuff apart’ to discover its hidden power source.
Education Programs
From wooden wall-mounted phones cranked by operators to the smartphone we use today, telephone historical centers serve as testaments of invention that profoundly transformed societies. By preserving telephone models, related equipment, telegraph machines, advertisements and photos museum and archive collections provide insight into how technology evolved throughout history.
Museums often showcase working telecommunications equipment like rotary dialers, picture phones, old switchboards and linemen’s tools like stirrups for climbing poles as well as an extensive cataloged library of telecom reference materials – tangible evidence of our evolving communication technology which inspires greater appreciation of global society.
Volunteers at Telephone Historical Centres also engage students with innovative lessons on innovation, culture and technological change; making a visit an ideal family outing, school field trip or group sight seeing tour destination.
