1
The Communication
Gallery
2 These resources have been created to help facilitate the self-guided tour of Milton Keynes Museum. This resource covers the telephones gallery and contains background information to discuss with the students about communications throughout the ages, things you may see in the gallery and activities for you to do with your students in the museum. The teacher’s resources are designed to encourage the students to investigate and ask questions.
Contents
1. Before your Visit
1.1. Background information: telecommunications
1.2. Gallery information
2. During your Visit
2.1. Object care
2.2. Things to do in the School Room
2.3. School Room Activity Sheet
2.4. Things to do in the Toy Room
2.5. Toy Room Activity Sheet
3. After your Visit
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Before your visit
Communications through the ages
Throughout the ages human beings have wanted to improve their ability to communicate at a distance. In early times, they used smoke signals, drums and mirrors for flashing messages. The late Victorian period saw the invention of the telegraph, telephone and radio and this changed the way we communicate. Over time, these inventions were improved and the late 20th century saw the rise of communications technologies that we know
today—mobile (cell phones) to the internet. The telephones gallery covers all of these technologies and give the visitor a glimpse into the technologies as they evolved.
Key learns for the visit are
Smart Phones, internet and email communications have not always existed.
You are lucky to live in a time of very fast development and change in communications systems. New products and ideas arrive all the time
There have been several men and women who have made inventions that have changed the world for the better, people such as Alexander Grahame Bell, Almon Strowger, Enrico Marconi and so on
Home life and the ability to talk to our friends has changed beyond all recognition in the lifetimes of your parents, and even more so in the life of your grand parents
The Telephones gallery.
Since the earliest times people have always tried to talk to each other over a distance such as smoke signals, flags and signal beacons. All of these have their advantages but also have their disadvantages, for example you can’t see flags in the dark, cannons can’t send complex messages. With the discovery of electricity in the 18th century, other ways of
communicating became possible. When Samuel Morse invented his code, a way of sending messages across the world became possible and resulted in the invention of telegraphs. The invention of the telephone in the late 19th century, allowed people to speak at a
distance and the paved the way for the communications systems in place today.
4 Things to discuss before your visit:
Imagine your life without telephones, without texts, whatsapp, Facebook etc.
Think about how far you could send a message with a drum or cannon.
Talk about how you would send an urgent message to a relative if you could only say 10 words and it would take a day for them to arrive, and cost you a day’s wages to send the message.
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During your visit
Object Care
Our museum aims to provide students with an exciting and hands on experience. The objects on display are not placed behind glasses cases and are presented for visitors to experience closely.
There are several items in the museum which may be handled by the school group, but we request that the artefacts are only handled with adult supervision. This resource will provide you with a list of artefacts that the students can explore and handle. Outside of this list, only adults are permitted to demonstrate how the artefacts work.
In the music room, unless a museum volunteer is present, unfortunately children are unable to touch certain objects.
During the self-guided portion of the tour, students should be in smaller groups of 6-8 to allow for safe handling of our collections and all groups must be supervised by an adult at all times.
Things to discuss with the children or tasks to set them
Ask the children how they make telephone calls or talk to their friends with a phone today. Do they use texts, WhatsApp or speak to people?
Who invented the first telephone in the world?
Discuss the effect of telephones on the world history
Can they find a photo of the man who invented the first telephone exchange? Who invented the telegraph code to allow messages to be sent around the world? When was the first mobile phone seen?
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Things to see and do in the telephone gallery
Telephones and communications were very different even just 20 years ago (no
smart phones, very slow access to the internet….) further back to the Victorian
period telephones were very different, you had to call the operator, tell them
the number that you wanted to call, and they would place the call for you (and
listen in if they wished), only very rich people had telephones so there were
very few people you could talk to anyway.
Here are some of the more important exhibits that we have that your students
can explore.
Telegraph Key
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Early telephone exchanges
Telephone exchanges are used to connect calls between people on the
telephone network. In the early days of phones these were manual and had
(usually a lady) operator to do the call connections. The men tended to be the
engineers and installers, women worked in the exchanges. Below is a photo of
a small manual telephone exchange. You can see in the middle of the exchange
the so called jack plugs. These were the wires that the calls would be carried
on.
Plugging them into to sockets made the connection. When someone wanted to
make a call they would lift the receiver, and this would operate a ‘tell-tale’ to
tell the operator that a connection was needed. They would speak to the caller
and ask then who they wanted or the number they wanted. The operator would
then connect the jack plug into the correct number and the connection would
be made
Sockets
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Strowger telephone exchange
This was invented by Almon Stowger in 1888, he was an undertaker. His
competitor’s wife operated the local exchange so anyone asking for an
undertaker was routed to the competition, as a result he invented an automatic
telephone exchange to get his share of business.
These came into use in the UK at the beginning of WW1— a long time after
their invention. They used a technology called relays that make a nice clicking
noise when they are connecting a number so you can hear them working. Some
of these exchanges are still in use today so they have lasted very well. The one
below is a small example. Real ones were very large
.
Candle stick telephone
This is a candle stick or upright telephone, which is representative of the style of phones use from the 1890s till around WW2. This has no way of dialling a number. You would just lift the earpiece and speak to the operator, they would then connect you to the number that you wanted. You can see these in action in the post office (in the street of shops) and make a call to the other shops. Telephone Mouthpieces convert sounds made by the speaker into electrical signals that can be sent down the telephone lines. At the other end the electrical signals are converted back to sound by a speaker. Early
telephones had very poor mouth pieces and speakers so it was often very difficult to understand people on the other end of the line (The British Army sent a message— ‘send reinforcements we are going to advance— this was translated as ‘send three and four pence we are going to a dance!)
mouthpiece
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Here is an early example of a more modern phone, as you can see it is made
of plastic which started to become available at this time. Note the rotary dial
push buttons and touch screens were still a long way away! It was also made
from plastic rather than wood and metal
Right until the early1980s, having a phone in your house was still relatively rare.
In most cases there was just one phone in the house (usually in the hall) and
calls were expensive to make. For many people at this time, phone calls were
made from public phone boxes such as the one below, they were often a long
way away, and often there was a queue to use them. You can see the slots
which were used to insert coins to pay for the calls- no debit cards or smart
cards in those days!
Practical activities in the phone gallery! Generally there will be one or
several room guides or education department guides on hand to help with the
activities, but below is a guide to activities the teacher should be able to
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Outside the gallery are two satellite dishes, get one person to stand on box in front the one on the left, and someone else to stand on the box on the one to the right. Get the child on the left to speak into the dish, the people at the other end should hear them clearly. Then get the child on the right to speak back. The aim of this exercise is to show how dishes collect waves (sound or radio) and focus them to a point where they can be heard or collected
Try your hand at sending a Morse Code message using the interactive reader, the aim of this exercise is to show how slow communications where in the Victorian period, and how difficult it is to use the Morse code properly.
On the display is a list of the codes and the letters they represent. For a dot, hold the key down for a short period, for a dash, hold it longer, and release the key after every dot or dash. Try the famous emergency call (SOS) which the Titanic sent out, this is three dots (short) three dashes (long) three dots. You should see the message on the LCD screen if you have done it correctly
Listen to the speaking clock and remember what the time is. The aim of this exercise is to show some of the services that were in place to help people overcome problems in daily life (like having watches than stopped if not wound). They were also aimed at persuading more people to invest in having a phone installed at home
Have fun using one of the novelty phones to call another one and watch as it bursts into life. Shows some of the things Phone companies did to encourage people to buy more phones, and to get children on the hook at an early age.
11 Try your hand at operating one of the manual telephone exchanges to call from one telephone to another. This activity needs three people, one to make the call, one to receive the call, and one to be the operator. Ask a guide to show you how!
Follow up activities
When out and about, look out for telephone boxes in your town, are they very different from the ones you saw in the telephone gallery? If so how are they different?
Look at the histories of the key people in the history of communications some suggestions are
o Michael Faraday, discovered the rules of electromagnetic waves which allowed the development of radio and mobile phones
o Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the first telephone
o Enrico Marconi who was one of the developers of radio technology o Almon Strowger who invented the telephone exchange
o Claude Shannon who invented much of the technology and mathematics used in communications systems
o Tim Burners Lee, who was the main developer of the internet
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After your visit
Explore More: Follow up your visit
You can encourage your students to reflect on their visit to the museum. Here
are some suggestions to start you off-
Ask the students to make a list of all the object they found most interesting. Encourage a discussion around the following questions: when were the objects invented, are these objects still used, how have they changed in the last 100 years, have they been replaced by something else?
Students can also undertake project work in smaller groups. This can be done in the form of art, drama, song and dance or presentations. Encourage them to be creative- ask them to write a rap, design something or play dress up
