Imagine you are on a journey across Britain. The landscape you pass through is rich in historical meaning, yet the knowledge of this history is compartmentalised: some lies in everyday experiences and memories, some lies in scholarly monographs, some is found on display (and even more, behind the scenes) in our great museums. We live in an old
country – but its meaning can be disconnected and hidden. Surprisingly this situation is true even for the aspects of our lives that seem so modern, so vivid, so everyday: the communications technologies that we use to organise our lives.
This research network will look at how we can reconnect this meaning to our lives. It will explore the potential benefits of and barriers to the creation of a mobile and web service in the history of communications. The project will develop a small pilot service to look at what happens when users can access, view and create the history of communications technology in relevant locations. Through the pilot project the research will share knowledge across a network of academic historians of science and technology, museum professionals, commercial partners, and users.
Find out more about this project, its research themes and participants.
The research network is a collaboration between UCL, Science Museum, Illumina Digital and BT. If you would like to know more about the network then please contact:
Dr Tilly Blyth
Curator of Computing and Information
Science Museum
Exhibition Road
London SW7 2DD
tilly.blyth@sciencemuseum.org.uk
0207 942 4211
This sounds like a great project.
I believe that in 1837 Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke built a two-kilometre copper connection between Euston and Chalk Farm along the railway, itself then newly laid – arguably the first practical telegraph.
A similar trial connection established on the Great Western Railway between Paddington and West Drayton two years later was extended to Slough in 1843
This was the one that became famous when it was used by the police to call ahead to apprehend a murderer who had got on the train hoping to make his escape, a story that did much to popularize the new medium.