Family Day Out: BT Information Age Gallery at the Science Museum #BTInfoAge

We are so lucky we live in London with easy access to beautiful museums and galleries. Little man really enjoy visiting them and learning about different topics. This weekend, we had a fun family day out at the Science Museum, located a short walk from South Kensington station.

The Science Museum has a wide range of family-friendly activities, including a series of high-energy science shows, workshops and experiments. As soon as you arrive, you will see the Making the Modern World gallery on the ground floor, exploring our cultural history since industrialisation began. It is a great place to learn more about everyday objects used from 1750.

Our next stop was the Information Age gallery on the first floor, telling the history of 200 years of communication and information technology that changed our world told. The gallery is divided into six networks: cable, broadcast, exchange, constellation, web and cell.

Each area presents the technologies and infrastructure alongside the extraordinary stories of the people who created, used and were affected by each new wave of change. As soon as you enter, you will see a model of the aerial tuning inductor from Rugby Radio Station, which sent messages around the world from 1926.

We really liked watching the puppet show about how telegraph networks send information from point to point in the form of electrical pulses, giving rise to the first global communication network.

Nowadays children are used to touchscreen, digital televisions, tablets and mobile phones. We take for granted how easy it is to communicate with others and stay connected with the rest of the world. While we were exploring the cable network, little man couldn’t believe how hard it was to send a message in the past. It would take hours for messages to arrive by telegraph network.

The whole family really liked trying to use the Morse key to send a telegraph. We found a bit tricky to get the words right as each letter was made out of a combination of short and long pulses. We talked about how pleased with today’s technologies as emails and text messages are much easier to type.

In 1897, you could also send multiple messages through the Baudot system, in which letters were represented by a combination of five keys on a keyboard. Pressing the keys completed an electric circuit, creating pulses of electric current. Little man plays the piano, and found the Baudot system very interesting as several telegraph message could be send at the same time.

I remember sending letters to pen pals when I was younger, eagerly waiting for the postman to arrive with a new letter, every couple of weeks or so. While in the gallery, we found that telegrams were sent in England between the 1843 and 1982, however they were expensive and every word counted.

In the broadcast network, little man was surprised to learn that televisions were rare in the past. Families, friends and neighbours crowded round small screens in home, cinemas and church halls to watch the live broadcast of the coronation in June 1953.

For several years, I worked in central London and used to walk past the BT Tower on a daily basis. However I had no idea it was built as part of the Post Office’s microwave communication network, providing more capacity for television. As microwave communication declined, the tower became a hub for London’s underground fibreoptic network, crucial to television and internet services.

We thoroughly enjoyed visiting the Information Age gallery and seeing how technology has changed over the years. It is very interactive, little ones can try to tune the radio, use old phones, watch a black and white televisions, try to send a telegraph and much more.

It was great to show little man how hard it was to communicate with others in the past. We talked about when I had my first computer at the age of 12 and how slow the internet used to be at the time. By the age of 18, I moved to London and I only called Brazil on the weekends as it was so expensive to make international phone calls then. 

Little man pointed out that nowadays we can easily speak to his grandmother in Brazil, send her photos and videos, all thanks to the evolution of communication and information technologies. He mentioned he is lucky to live in the present as he couldn’t live without his tablet. I couldn’t live without speaking to my family in Brazil, so my favourite invention would be the internet (and computers and telephones too!)

Check our your Information Age in this fun quiz: www.bt.com/whatsyourinformationage

What is your favourite tech item that you can’t live without?

I am a member of the Mumsnet Bloggers Network Research Panel, a group of parent bloggers who have volunteered to review products, services, events and brands for Mumsnet. I have not paid for the product or to attend an event. I have editorial control and retain full editorial integrity. I have received a voucher as a token of thanks for this post.