This museum devoted to local telephone history houses an impressive collection of antique phones and switching equipment, such as their fully operational Strowger step-by-step private automatic exchange that illustrates how telephone technology reshaped society.
Museums such as this one provide insight into the wider implications of technological innovations through oral histories and archival research, showing that access to technology isn’t inevitable and equitable telecommunications access requires deliberate societal effort to be achieved.
Gridley Museum of Independent Telephony
Gridley, Illinois boasts an extraordinary museum that houses working models of many of America’s earliest telephones as well as a fully functioning hand-on switchboard. This collection pays homage to local independent telephone companies that sprung up across America after Alexander Graham Bell’s patent expired.
On entering, visitors are welcomed by an impressive recreation of a 1920s phone office and 1946 community switchboard, along with antique line insulators, crank wall phones, decorator phones and flip phones from yesteryear as well as an extensive archive library with vintage telephone directories, scrapbooks and technical manuals from across time periods.
Rogers Kaufman founded the museum in 1970 when he purchased controlling interest of privately-owned Gridley Telephone Company and started gathering up old equipment and records, quickly realizing he had all the makings of a museum collection that has become one of the world’s premier collections of its type.
Virtual Museum of Telecommunications
History buffs and tech enthusiasts alike will find this museum to be an intriguing glimpse into how human communication has developed over time. Their extensive collection features antique telephones, switching equipment and related artifacts.
This vast trove of knowledge is not only preserved, but actively utilized for educational purposes. Visitors can frequently touch, listen to and operate historical equipment for a more immersive experience. In addition, special events at the museum include Operator Appreciation Day; guest speakers; hands-on workshops where you can learn to restore equipment or even send Morse code!
Volunteers – many of them retired telecommunications professionals – play an invaluable role. Offering their invaluable knowledge and expertise to the community, these volunteers lend invaluable knowledge from tour guiding to rewiring exchanges (one volunteer described it as similar to performing an ancient puzzle), all the while helping ensure the museum preserves its rich legacy through technological progress.
Hello, Montreal!
Hello Montreal! is designed to be both educational and entertaining; using material from Bell’s vast private collections, Hello, Montreal! provides an entertaining historical, technological, and sociological account of telephones in our lives and their evolution over time. Children will test their dialing ability on a rotary phone before discovering whether or not they would have made good switchboard operators back then — helping connect 140,000 callers a day!
The Museum also pays homage to those who built and installed telephone networks – from those who erected poles and buried cables, through to designing technology and installing telephones in homes, businesses and public buildings – as well as those who designed technology and installed phone lines into them. Accredited by Museums Alberta with hands-on exhibits and an extraordinary multi-media historical Telecommunication Theatre Show experience for groups. Established by retired Edmonton D TEL employees on December 3, 1987 in Old Strathcona neighbourhood before relocating in 2004 at Prince of Wales Armouries location.
