“It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.”
That was the Queen’s first tweet – sent through the @BritishMonarchy account – heralding the launch of a major new exhibition at London’s Science Museum.
Three years in the planning, the exhibition is one of the most ambitious projects the museum has undertaken.
Alongside historic objects, visitors can enjoy interactive experiences.
The Information Age gallery, opened by the Queen this morning, takes visitors on a journey through the history of modern communications from the telegraph to the smartphone.
There is the first transatlantic telegraph cable which connected Europe and North America, the broadcast equipment behind the BBC’s first radio programme in 1922, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, which hosted the first website.
The exhibition includes the NeXT computer Sir Tim Berners-Lee used to host the first website
“We really want them to see that our predecessors lived through similar periods of change. Ours isn’t the only revolution – just the latest. in a series of transformations since the electric telegraph in the 1830s.”
Baroness Martha Lane Fox, who has campaigned for better access to and understanding of the internet, welcomes the new gallery: “It’s an amazing opportunity for people young and old to come and see the extraordinary developments in technology over the last hundred years or so. It really reminds me of the scale of ambition that people have had to change things.”
It was perhaps fitting that she chose to launch the gallery on Twitter. Information Age: Six Networks That Changed Our World is the first museum gallery dedicated to the history of information and communication technologies.
