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.
