The University of Salford is celebrating 170 years of electrical communications with a Family Telecoms Day at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, this Wednesday 25 July. That will be 170 years to the day since Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke demonstrated their needle telegraph communications system in 1837.
Visitors to the free event will get the chance to see a Wheatstone-Cooke needle telegraph, seeing how it used the magnetic properties of electricity to deflect a series of needles, which then pointed to alphabet letters and spelt out words. There will also be an exhibition of 170 years of telecoms technology and hands-on experiments using semaphore, Morse code, telephones and much more.
The Wheatstone-Cooke success was the first in a whole series of major inventions that have transformed the way we communicate says Salford Universitys Professor Nigel Linge. The telegraph systems of 1837 were the equivalent of the high performance mobile phones of today. Its amazing how telecommunications has evolved so much in such a relatively short time. Now we have digital television, the internet, satellites and the mobile phone. You simply cannot imagine life today without telecoms – and the pace of change is set to continue to accelerate, not slow.
The event runs from 10.30 to 4pm on Wednesday and all are welcome. Theres more information on Professor Linges work, which includes research into the applications of new optical manipulation techniques for improving bandwidth in fibre optical systems, and the development of high bandwidth mobile networks which exploit the latest advances in wireless LAN technology here. And you can share your views on these topics by emailing phonesproject-cse@salford.ac.uk or texting 07624 803196.