The National Archives are to digitise British Telecom’s physical archive, making almost half a million photographs, documents and correspondence preserved by BT over 165 years available online. The BT Archives reveal Britain’s leading role in the development of telecommunications and take in the whole of the UK including Southern Ireland until 1921 and the Channel Islands until 1973, along with the UK’s communications with countries across the globe. Examples of documents in the Archive include: details of the introduction of the telephone to the UK by Alexander Graham Bell in 1877; the Installation of the telephone at Balmoral Castle, Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle in 1910-11; arrangements for telegraphic transmission of Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ speech from Manchester in 1872; and documentation relating to experiments with optical fibres from the 1960s that led to today’s fibre optics networks. Examples of photographs include: the first UK telephone exchange 1878; early videoconferencing and viewphones from 1960s and the Queen making the first automatic long distance telephone call from Bristol to Edinburgh in 1958.
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