This collection includes antique telecom equipment, company memorabilia and framed artwork from leading telecom providers of yesteryear. Furthermore, an extensive paper document archive dating back to 1895 – such as Edmonton city directories – as well as technical manuals – is housed here.
Scanned telephone directories allow researchers to locate historical residential and commercial subscribers from scanned directories, making this resource especially helpful for historians and genealogists.
The Museum of Telephony
Today’s phone usage can feel like performing a magic trick; one press of a button connects us instantly with our mother in Philadelphia or best friend in New York. However, it wasn’t always this seamless; initially telephony required the skillful engineering expertise of Alexander Graham Bell to bring its concept from laboratory bench into living rooms.
At the Museum of Telephony you’ll discover displays of antique telephone devices that chart their development over time, from Alexander Graham Bell’s Gallows Frame Phone and wooden phones to push-button models and more modern push-button phones. It offers an interesting snapshot into how technology has advanced.
Researchers can access an impressive archive at the Museum of Telephony. Their collection features city directories dating back to 1895 as well as technical manuals covering an array of telecommunication topics. Furthermore, there are a few photographs which detail Edmonton and Alberta’s telephone industry history.
The Virtual Museum of Telecommunications
The Virtual Museum of Telecommunications is an educational research facility which hosts an extraordinary selection of artifacts and archives that trace the development of communications over time. This impressive collection boasts working equipment ranging from Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone to modern mobile phones; original volumes such as 1877’s “The Telephone: An Account of Electricity, Magnetism, and Sound with Instructions for Making a Speaking Telephone” also exist to meet public demand for information about this new invention.
There have been various interpretations of what constitutes a virtual museum. ICOM advocates for museums to work with objects that form collections linked by context or focus. Other theories define virtual museums as immersive networked environments with multiple users supporting multiple users at once – Connected Earth is an innovative example that connects digitalized objects from multiple museums with rich content from museums and galleries in its network.
The Telephone Museum of Ellsworth
With smartphones rendering physical wires obsolete, we may think we have seen the last of them; but one museum in Maine remains dedicated to keeping this tradition alive: Ellsworth’s Telephone Museum features various switchboards and allows visitors to experience actual old phones first-hand.
This collection includes archives from both AT&T and its nineteenth century predecessors as well as AT&T itself, with letters, accounting ledgers, and documents that trace its development from Alexander Graham Bell’s attic workshop up until today’s AT&T.
The Telephone Museum of Ellsworth houses an array of equipment and artifacts, ranging from manual cord boards and step-by-step or crossbar switches to a small Kellogg ship’s telephone – these make this museum truly stand out among its counterparts, acting more as research facilities rather than exhibit space.
The Telephone Historical Centre
The Telephone Historical Centre is a research facility housing an impressive collection of artifacts and documents dating from Alexander Graham Bell’s era to smartphones today, from original wooden wall-mounted phones that marked his inauguration until multifunctional smartphones from today. Furthermore, working telephony equipment such as manual operator switchboards and step-by-step private automatic branch exchanges (demonstrating the stepping switch principle), tools of trade copper wire insulators are on display here as well.
This collection also boasts an expansive library of telephone-related books, catalogs, technical journals and practices, comprehensive files on Bell Canada from its early days as an independent company to its eventual merger with Northern Telecom as well as extensive records documenting Canadian telecommunications in foreign countries.
Telecommunications museums go beyond collecting and preserving artifacts by also offering educational outreach programs that acquaint children and young adults with technological changes over time. They may host off-site community educational events as well as “traveling trunk” programs which bring specially selected artifacts directly to communities that cannot easily visit the museum itself.
