By Stuart Jenner.
If you like technology history, consider visiting the Connections Museum. But you may leave with more than information about telephones or perspectives on technological change. The social impact of technology was the most memorable element of my visit – the way telephones enabled community… and connections… of people in small towns, big cities, and across the globe.
“It’s like magic,” I said as I observed a working demonstration of the 101-year-old telephone switching machine that showed what it took for a phone call to be completed in the 1920s. One part of of device moved up, activating another part, then another…
The Connections Museum, located at 7000 East Marginal Way South (near the Seattle side of the First Avenue South bridge), is one of the few museums worldwide with antique telephone switching equipment that actually works.
The museum also has a wide range of other equipment exhibits: phones from the 80s (that is, the 1880s to the “other” 80s) – a Motorola handheld “mobile” phone that looked as big as a loaf of French bread. Sticker shock: the ad next to it says it is available for the bargain price of $3995 – in 80s dollars (not all that different from what a solid used car cost at the time.) Then there are cables the diameter of a hamburger, coated in lead, that could carry possibly 20 calls.
There are a few “fun” items:
- The oversized phone JP Patches used on his show.
- 1964 World’s Fair Picturephone. It was really interesting to see others through the video phone introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair in Seattle – then flip to the ‘self’ mode and see how I appeared to the people using the other device a few yards away.
- There’s the phone exchange that was installed inside Frederick and Nelson …. could I put a call through to my favorite preschool teacher, Mrs. Cheever?
For the most part, the exhibits are very techie in nature, but the innovations they represented provided inspiration for later developments in computing. As the docent said, telephone equipment advanced in the 20s and 30s, and companies such as Western Electric and Bell Labs were at the leading edge of technology.
How does Technology Impact Society?
This museum has a lot more than just equipment. More than technology, what I really appreciated was the social history of how the growth of the telephone industry created community and helped people connect to one another.
We learned how, in small towns, one household would usually host the town exchange. Whoever ran the exchange was “the” person in town for knowing anything and everything that was happening. If someone wanted to call long distance, say, from Seahurst to Everett, the operator would have to connect a cable into a “trunk” line that would go out to a more central location. And we learned about “party lines”, where anyone could pick up and hear what others were saying. If too many people were listening, the signal dropped, so the callers would ask others “politely” to “get off the line.” A part of this story also is the job opportunities for women, at a time when work opportunities outside the home were very limited.
The Connections Museum is worth a visit… but I think people who will be most interested are those who lived through and used some of the phones and equipment on display.
The museum is only open on Sundays from 10am to 3pm, and you can’t view the exhibits until after you’ve gone on a docent tour.
For more information, visit this website.
