At Telecom Museum we celebrate the creativity, skill and industry that characterize telecom. With an expansive archive and educational programming we honor this storied industry.

The Telephone Historical Centre (THG) is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization funded through membership dues, research fees and grants. THG operates two museums as well as maintaining an archive of telecom equipment.

Student Caller Program

Telephone Historical Centre (THG), one of the world’s premier collectors groups dedicated to telecom history preservation, boasts one of the largest membership bases of any collectors group in existence today. Members collect items dating from telecom’s early days until now as well as operating two museums and an archive with physical items located both locally in Denver as well as digital resources – funded through membership dues, research fees and donations, THG operates non-profitably with funds coming from membership dues, research fees and donations; developing communication, networking and sales skills while working to preserve our telecom heritage heritage!

Community Outreach

The Telephone Historical Centre houses one of North America’s premier collections of vintage telephones dating back to their invention. Items found within its hallowed walls date all the way back to early phone history!

Due to Covid-19 and cancellation of in-person group health engagement events, HBEC staff, CAB members and volunteers developed this telephone outreach project as a means of staying engaged with research registry participants while meeting individual needs in a way that was safe and feasible. This one call served multiple functions – collecting information about participants’ experiences with regards to strength/weaknesses/challenges of pandemic; suggesting resources (i.e. mental health services or food services); sending masks if indicated – plus sending masks when requested by participants themselves!

THG is a nonprofit organization funded by membership dues, donations and grants, operating two museums and an archive while offering educational programs on telecommunication history. We enjoy strong support from local history partners all across Texas who assist us in operating these operations.

Special Events

The Telecommunications History Group was formed by a small group of former and current telecom employees who were shocked to discover that many items of telecom history were being discarded or destroyed as buildings closed or people no longer found them useful. Today, THG operates two museums as well as one of the nation’s largest archives dedicated to telecom history.

Visit Roseville Telephone Museum or Gridley Telephone Museum, both featuring an assortment of antique telephones and memorabilia that would make for a fantastic family outing, school field trip or sightseeing attraction.

THG’s collection traces the development of communication technologies from Alexander Graham Bell’s attic workshop in 1876 all the way up to mobile phone technology used today, many of these pieces still in working condition today.

Volunteer Opportunities

Every year, hundreds of Alexandria residents volunteer their time, expertise and energy to support City of Alexandria museums and programs. From studying artifacts to conducting museum tours or using computer skills for research findings – there are dozens of volunteer opportunities available at Alexandria museums and programs.

Volunteers at JANM play an essential role in Museum operations: greeting visitors, helping with special exhibitions and events, conducting group tours, school museum programs, library operations and collections management. Furthermore, some volunteers opt to explore museums independently through education journal work or participate in Nima Voices video interviews; translate materials for the Discover Nikkei web project or transcribe oral history interviews as an independent activity.

Do you enjoy working with people? Volunteers at the Science Center could find a home on board the USS Requin to engage guests and answer their questions about life onboard our cold war submarine, while greeters are needed at Black History, Fort Ward and Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary Museums – plus any number of collections may require your assistance as well!

The Telephone Historical Centre is a hands-on museum that commemorates the history of wired telephone networks. The museum showcases working Panel and Crossbar electromechanical central-office switches as well as outside plant displays of poles, cables, splicing equipment, tools and hundreds of antique telephones and switchboards plus an archived collection of related reference materials.

Group Tours

This museum, housed within Jefferson Barracks Park’s historical buildings, boasts an extensive collection of telephone equipment and memorabilia. Groups of 10 or more may schedule guided tours at a small fee; advance notification must be provided.

Working Panel and Crossbar electromechanical central-office switches at the museum provide visitors with an engaging firsthand experience of telecom history, as do antique telephones and phone booths from throughout history. Other displays include manual operator switchboards, novelty phones and one of the world’s largest collections of telephone-related tools and equipment.

Come with a Museum educator on a 60-minute tour of our core exhibit galleries! Through objects and stories, explore how people from diverse groups experienced the Revolutionary era–Loyalists, Hessians, free and enslaved individuals of African descent as well as women at home and at war. Additionally, consider what words like liberty, equality and freedom meant then–and how these ideas continue to shape lives today.

Self-Guided Tours

Self-guided tours allow visitors to explore at their own pace. They may choose to linger over a delicious local lunch, take additional time admiring stunning views or set out an hour earlier than planned.

Self-guided tours typically include a map with prompts to help visitors navigate their surroundings, with these prompts depending on the nature of experience desired. They may be as specific or broad as necessary.

Self-guided tours have been an efficient and convenient method of leasing apartments during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving prospective renters an efficient way to tour homes without needing an agent present. Knock Tours has designed best practice guides to guide property managers and onsite teams on how best to prepare for self-guided home shows, enabling them to maximize team efficiency while creating a positive tour experience for prospects.

Birthday Parties

The Telephone Historical Centre is one of Edmonton’s favorite family attractions and Canada’s largest telephone museum. With interactive displays showing how communications technology has advanced since 1885, visitors will learn more than they ever could at this exhibit.

The museum opened on December 3, 1987 in Old Strathcona and relocated to its current home at Prince of Wales Armouries Heritage Centre in 2004. It is owned and managed by a foundation, with accreditation by Museums Alberta.

Birthday Parties in the Celebrations Room can accommodate groups of up to 40 guests, and admission includes admission for both the birthday child, all guests attending their party and their families, including any additional museum admission fees that may apply if your group exceeds 40 people. It is the Renter’s responsibility to adequately clean Celebrations as per Birthday Manager specifications; including paper, food or drink spilled onto tables/floor, balloons or any party favors/refreshments brought in from outside.

Special Events

The Telephone Historical Centre was established by retired ED TEL employees in Edmonton in 1987 to preserve telecom history and provide tours both group and self-guided of its collection, featuring telephones, switches, poles, wires and splicing equipment as well as educational programs. It offers both group tours as well as self-guided visits.

The museum collection boasts thousands of artifacts dating back over 2,600 years of human communication innovation, such as working electromechanical central-office switches such as Panel and Crossbar electromechanical switches; antique telephones; switchboards; outside plant displays with poles, cables, splicing equipment and tools as well as a cataloged technical library.

The Jefferson Barracks Telephone Museum is housed in a stunningly restored 1896 building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Operated by Telecom Pioneers – an educational non-profit founded by Southwestern Bell/AT&T retirees and their families – this interactive museum provides hands-on exhibits that pique curiosity about engineering and history.

The Telephone Historical Centre in Edmonton has closed after 31 years of operations due to relevancy and financial challenges, according to its foundation. This decision came about as part of their overall business plan.

Discover our digital collection of United States telephone directories! These books include both business and residential listings; some early directories also contain people’s occupations as well as whether or not they rented or owned their homes.

The Telephone Booth Collection

A telephone booth (also referred to as a kiosk or public call box) is a small structure equipped with a payphone designed for single users to step into and close its door while using.

Berlin witnessed its inaugural telephone kiosk (Fernesprechkiosk), known as Telefonbillets, opening up for use in 1881 and eventually giving way to coin-operated booths.

Since the invention of telephones, countless booths have been invented and deployed; some of them, like the iconic red British phone box, have even become cultural icons.

Modern pay phones have quickly become the preferred replacements for telephone booths in recent decades, such as this example from Munster, Germany which features three sides without doors but without enclosure. It was especially popular during the latter part of the 20th century.

The Bell Telephone Collection

Bell first created and began selling his telephone service in 1877, which quickly proved popular with customers. By 1878 his business had taken off but needed professional management – Gardiner Hubbard, his financial backer and father-in-law suggested Theodore Newton Vail from US Government’s Railway Mail Service take on this challenge.

Vail brought a more businesslike approach to telephone operations and instilled his employees with a new sense of service. He advocated technical improvements such as increased circuit capacity, the use of ground iron wire, and enhanced battery systems; as well as pressuring local companies within the Bell System to standardize equipment more regularly – but often encountered opposition.

Vail left his phone company in 1919 to become president of AT&T and helped ensure the nation had over 60 million telephones; 51 million of which belonged to the Bell System; virtually all were dial operated; and 90% of calls could cross country without switching fees; these successes can be traced directly back to his belief in good relations between public and Bell System operators.

The Telephone Directory Collection

Telephone directories were an effective and lucrative form of advertising in their own day, often competing or outpacing main-media ads for advertisement space. Due to this phenomenon, pressure was applied upon phone directory companies to de-regulate and open up their directories to competitive pressures.

Due to deregulation, a variety of new products and services were made possible. One such innovation was the “reverse directory”, enabling individuals to look up their phone number in the telephone directory for subscriber name, address (if unlisted), phone number information etc.

At the same time, directories themselves experienced profound transformation as they became databases. With each database taking on new characteristics and functions in today’s networked media environment, fierce battles emerged for control of such lists.

The Telephone Kiosk Collection

Any Briton who has traversed the UK will recognise its iconic red telephone boxes. While these have gradually given way to mobile phones, aficionados of them have begun fighting back and their aesthetic appeal is slowly being acknowledged.

Giles Gilbert Scott designed the original red kiosks as part of a competition held in 1924. The winning design, K2, was initially installed in London; however, due to its cost-intensive nature and General Post Office requirements for more cost effective kiosks;

Avoncroft Museum at Bromsgrove in Worcestershire boasts an extensive collection of former GPO national telephone kiosks, such as one from Strowger village in Essex with an operational Unit Automatic Exchange as well as an entire 300 line exchange building from Stapleford. Furthermore, K2 kiosks can also be found here as well as one of only remaining London K1s in existence in Britain.

The Telephone Historical Centre holds an incredible collection that serves as a source for those interested in speech and hearing research, telephony and telecom, sound engineering and electronics manufacturing. I recently met up with Sheldon Hochheiser, their corporate historian, who shared his deep knowledge of its materials as well as any organizational quirks I might find interesting.

Collections

This collection covers an expansive variety of subjects and contains various artifactual items from C & P Telephone equipment pieces to employee awards, commemorative materials, general company memorabilia, framed artworks and scrapbooks to miscellaneous paper material and even some scrapbooks and maps – the collection has something for everyone!

SHELDON HOCHHEISER: Primarily, there is an extensive corporate collection that documents the entire parent company and Bell system monopoly from its inception to present day. There are also individual collections dedicated to research and development projects as well as business records or public relations issues at different branches within the organization.

Historical photographs are organized alphabetically and by subject in boxed folders dating from the 1880s to 1970s. Larger images in four-flap enclosures require special care while Bound periodicals encompass SNET publications spanning multiple topics over an extended timeframe.

Exhibitions

The Telephone Historical Centre’s exhibits showcase telecommunication technology through artifacts and photographs as well as books that document its history and technology. Their collection contains one-of-a-kind volumes such as 1877’s The Telephone: An Account of Electricity, Magnetism and Sound with Instructions for Making a Speaking Telephone which was written to satisfy public demand for explanations about how this new invention worked.

The THC boasts an interesting Step-by-Step Private Automatic Branch Exchange which shows how manual switchboards use stepping switch principles; and also offers an exhibit that documents mobile phone technology from 1970s car phones through to modern cellular phones.

THC is located at Edmonton’s Prince of Wales Armouries Heritage Centre and first opened to the public on December 3, 1987 in Old Strathcona neighborhood before later moving to its current site. Unfortunately, its founding foundation decided to dissolve due to issues relating to relevancy, finances, structural integrity and structural support among others in April 2018.

Research

Archives hold an impressive collection of vintage telephone directories, technical manuals and books about telecom technology and history as well as artifacts and photographs documenting phone use in Edmonton and Alberta over time. Furthermore, oral histories conducted with former telecom industry workers can also be found here.

Series VI: Subject Files (1879-203) follows the 1991 SNET Records Management Schedule and contains files which provide information regarding exchange histories and facts, personal recollections of town telephone history and buildings as well as general historical materials about towns associated with SNET. Also included are blueprints and diagrams related to projects completed by SNET.

Other interesting materials include a newspaper article from 1957 that documents the difficulty faced by full-time and student telephone operators at a university with only forty phones available: thirty-three for students in Bartlett Hall, seventeen phones for women in Lawther Hall and fourteen phones in Seerley-Baker Hall to serve 545 campus extensions.

At a time when connectivity is available at our fingertips, the Telephone Historical Centre helps us remember and understand how this technology has affected our lives.

The Bell Canada Collection houses records that chronicle its growth since 1880, along with an exhibition featuring 32 phone kiosks that trace this street furniture design’s evolution.

Hands-on exhibits

From old-fashioned cigar box phones to Edmonton’s original manual system phone installed in 1878, the museum houses an astounding collection of wired communications history. Documents, photos, catalogues and equipment date back from when Bell established a plant in Brantford in 1878 until today’s Bell-Northern Research and Development Laboratories; comprehensive files on Trans-Canada Telephone Company affiliates and independent companies as well as telecommunications in foreign countries make up this incredible selection.

The Museum’s interactive exhibits give visitors an understanding of how telecommunication technology has advanced over time, including trying their luck at working switching stations and discovering innovations that led to modern cell phones. Furthermore, its collection includes 32 telephone kiosks – iconic curbside boxes once found dotted across British city streets – some still in service which visitors can explore as an homage to an age gone by.

Artifacts

Some artifacts are available for visitors to touch; others are stored away in drawers and cabinets. Visitors can explore a pair of 19th-century hand tools, duplicates of items placed in Beaver Hall building cornerstone, stamp albums and tokens from telecommunications services as well as pieces from venerable telephone poles – these artifacts make up part of an interactive experience at Beaver Hall Museum.

Lexi Coburn, Revolutionary War and Iron Industry Museum collections intern, spent her summer assisting Collections staff as they photographed historical objects to create digital records that enable researchers and curators to easily locate them. From folding knives to musket ball molds digitization projects were undertaken during her internship.

The Archives of the Telephone Historical Centre contain more than three million paper documents and 25.000 pieces of equipment that cover telephone history from its creation by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 up to today. This includes files on Bell Canada, independent Canadian telephone companies and foreign telecommunications. Correspondence between Bell and his associates; dates, photographs and equipment samples related to early telephony as well as commentary and opinions related to emerging technologies from 1870s until present day are also part of this vast repository of knowledge.

Archive

The Collection encompasses thousands of archival photographs and prints as well as films, tapes and other audiovisual media that offer insight into many facets of telecommunications history.

This collection includes the original volume “How It Works”, published shortly after the invention of the telephone in 1877 and intended to meet public demand for an explanation of this new invention.

This collection also encompasses books, magazines and other publications on telecommunications. Of particular note is an index of seven hundred telephone directories on microfilm; copies of items that were placed in Beaver Hall building cornerstone; records from Hamilton Ontario office where Bell first set up shop; early telephone equipment pictures taken by staff members at that office; photographs; postcards collection used by first staff members as well as copies of newspaper clipping binders used by first staff. There are also an impressive variety of old stamps from around the world related to telecomms stamp collection that date back as far back as 1880!

Virtual museum

Now that cell phones have nearly become ubiquitous, it can be hard to imagine curbside telephone kiosks as being popular – yet this unique collection in Guernsey tells an amazing tale about technological development.

THNOC’s collections are constantly growing as more items are donated to the museum for display, research, education and preservation. Information about our holdings can be found through themed guides, subject bibliographies and databases; forms are also available for those wishing to reproduce Collection items.

Explore Alberta’s phone era through nine interactive galleries available through Google Arts & Culture on both mobile phones and tablets, plus an accompanying lesson plan designed specifically for educators.