Telecommunication through the ages

Coventry University, in partnership with BT and The National Archives, has been awarded almost £745,000 by major UK funding agency JISC to catalogue, digitise and develop a searchable online archive of almost half a million photographs, documents and correspondence preserved by BT over the last 165 years.

 

The collection includes documents dating from 1846 to the present day and features subjects such as industrial and gender relations in the workplace, advertising, social change, and science and technology.

 

Examples of documents in BT Archives include arrangements for the telegraphic transmission of Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ speech from Manchester in 1872; details of the installation of the telephone at Buckingham Palace, Sandringham and Windsor Castle from 1892; and documentation of experiments with optical fibres from the 1960s, which led to today’s fibre optics networks.

 

The New Connections: BT e-Archive is due to complete in 2013.