Messages from the past

By T.S.

ONE of the odd things about the history of communications is how much things have changed since the Victorian era—smartphones are barely recognisable as descendants of rotary telephones—and yet how much has remained the same. The first example of spam e-mail dates to 1864. The telegraph inspired even greater amounts of hype and ridicule in the 19th century than the internet did on the cusp of the 21st. People worried about information overload as early as the 1860s. The technologies come and go, but human nature remains seemingly unchanged, with new toys merely pressing the same old buttons in our stone-age brains.

This paradoxical combination of change and constancy is one of the many things illuminated by the BT Digital Archives, which have just gone online. It is a repository of documents, photographs, advertisements, reports and other material digitised from the archives of BT, formerly British Telecom, Britain's former monopoly telecoms provider. The archive covers the period from the mid-19th century, when Britain's first telegraph companies appeared, through the nationalisation of those firms in 1870 and their reorganisation as part of the Post Office, to the eventual separation and privatisation of British Telecom in 1982. The slideshow above shows a selection of highlights from the archive, from an engraving of the main telegraph operators' room at London's Central Telegraph Office in 1860 to a photograph of an experimental videophone from 1970, and revealing some unexpected stories along the way.

I was particularly amused by the image of a mobile telegraph office from 1872, which allowed brief text messages to be sent from wherever it was set up, thus making it an early precursor of the mobile phone. The Post Office's rejection of the telephone as a technology of limited use in 1877 reminds us how difficult it is to assess the significance of new technologies; is Google Glass, for example, a geek toy or the harbinger of a new era of wearable computers? The Electrophone, which delivered audio entertainment by telephone until it was superseded by radio in the 1920s, may seem a silly technology today, but it is arguably just an early form of cable TV. The question of whether entertainment is best delivered to the home by cable or radio (including satellite) is still a live one; each technology has its merits. The photograph of a man taking a phone call while dining in 1910—evidently a promotional photograph intended to encourage the use of the telephone at the table—shows that modern debates about the appropriate social etiquette for using mobile phones have deep roots. And the complaint, from 1935, that the new red phone boxes then being installed around the country were obtrusive eyesores is a reminder that technologies that are considered romantic and old-fashioned today were once new and shocking.

BT's new digital archive contains more than just these jolly images, of course. Its 500,000 documents are already being used as part of a study of the changing nature of business English, for example. The digitisation was carried out in conjunction with Coventry University and the National Archives, with funding from JISC, a government body that provides digital services for education and research. You can stroll through its virtual shelves here.