Organizations, Museums, and Archives

• The Hawthorne Works Museum at Morton College
  

  In 1908, 25,000 local Chicago residents, many of whom were new immigrants of Czech or Polish descent, began working at Western Electric’s new Hawthorne Works manufacturing plant in Cicero, Illinois. The rural Hawthorne Works plant became a self-sufficient city with 100 buildings, a hospital, fire brigade, laundry facilities, greenhouse, a brass band, running track, tennis courts, gymnasium, an annual beauty pageant and a staff of trained nurses who made house calls!
  In 1900, only 676,733 Bell telephones existed in the country. By 1975, 45,000 Western Electric employees had manufactured 140 million phones and provided the country-wide infrastructure for this exponential growth. They manufactured the famous inventions of Bell Labs from vacuum tubes to transistors, sound for motion pictures, the loudspeaker, the microphone, the transcontinental phone line, radar and ship-to-shore equipment for the Signal Corps and fiber optics.
  This Museum provides a lens through which you can view the rich industrial history of our community, and, by extension, the history of 20th Century America.

  View a gallery of images from the museum.

• The Recent Past Preservation Network
  "Welcome to RPPN! Our mission is to promote the preservation of buildings from the recent past and help others who are trying to do the same. Too often we lose important buildings that are less than fifty-years old, buildings that are considered "out of style," or buildings that are declared "non-contributing" to history at the civic, state, or national level. It is our goal to educate and inform the public and politicians about the value of structures from the midcentury and beyond."
  "The Recent Past Preservation Network promotes preservation education, assistance, and activism through the medium of new technologies, to encourage a contextual understanding of our modern built environment. The Network assists preservationists by providing an open community platform for the development and revision of practical strategies to document, preserve, and re-use historic places of the recent past."
  The RPPN's interests include telecommunications buildings and towers.
• The Mercurians
  "The Mercurians began meeting in 1986 for the purpose of generating networks between people who share work and interests in the history of communication technologies, defining the field broadly. Our activities include publishing a semi-annual newsletter, Antenna, meeting annually at Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) conferences, organizing paper sessions for SHOT meetings, and pursuing contacts between meetings. Antenna serves both as a clearing house for readers and an informal forum for their ideas. We welcome contributions, including notices and queries about Mercurians' projects as well as short essays on their work. Antenna includes book reviews and other materials about conferences, museums, publications, archives, funding, and other pertinent materials."
• The Society for the History of Technology
  "An interdisciplinary organization, SHOT is concerned not only with the history of technological devices and processes, but also with the relations of technology to science, politics, social change, the arts and humanities, and economics. A membership in SHOT connects you with almost 2000 individual members and 1500 institutions around the world. In addition to professional historians and museum curators, SHOT members include practicing scientists and engineers, anthropologists, librarians, political scientists, and economists."
• Telephone Collectors International
  "Telephone Collectors International is an organization of telephone collectors, hobbyists and historians who are helping to preserve the history of the telecommunications industry through the collection of telephones and telephone related material. Our collections represent all aspects of the industry; from the very first wooden prototypes that started the industry to the technological marvels that made the automatic telephone exchange possible."
• The Telecommunications History Group, Inc.
  "The Telecommunications History Group (THG) is a non-profit organization funded by membership dues, research fees and grants. THG maintains and operates one of the nation's largest privately held telecommunications archives. We also operate two small museums, conduct educational programs on telephone history, and offer tours of the historic telephone building at 931 14th St. in Denver, Colorado."
• The New England Museum of Telephony
  "The New England Museum of Telephony, incorporated in 1984, was founded to demonstrate the social and technical significance of the telephone network as it existed between 1876 and 1983, showing the ingenuity and craftsmanship employed within it by preserving, documenting and operating examples of telephone apparatus."
• The Antique Telephone Collectors Association
  "The Antique Telephone Collectors Association, or ATCA, is the largest telephone collectors organization in the world. Chartered in 1971 as a non-profit corporation by the state of Kansas, its over 1500 active members are located throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia."
• Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communications and Computation
  An amazing collection of artifacts and documents, covering a broad range of electrical and electronic technologies.
• The Museum of Communications
  "The Museum of Communications, formerly known as the Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum is sponsored by the Washington Telephone Pioneers of America, and is located in Seattle, Washington. The museum reveals the history of the telephone and the equipment that makes it all work. Exhibits from 1876, starting with a model of Alexander Graham Bell's first successful creation of a telephone, to the modern phone that we all take for granted today are on exhibit. Automated displays and special exhibits permit your hands-on participation. Our museum exhibits are unique and virtually all the equipment is currently operational. Guided tours are provided by the volunteers. The Museum of Communications is visited by people from all over the world and may well be the best museum of its type in the world. Take a virtual tour of the museum now and plan to come and visit us in person in Seattle, Washington."
• The BellSouth Telephone Museum
  BellSouth Center, 675 West Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta, Georgia 30375
  Phone (404) 529 - 0971
  Open Monday through Friday from 11:00AM to 1:00PM and is available for school or group tours.

External Lists

• Telephone Collectors International "Museums and Exhibits" list

Updated on January 13, 2007 at 18:53 by Albert LaFrance

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