Female telephone operators connecting calls at the Sorø exchange in 1921. From the Telephone Museum's photo archives at the Post & Tele Museum.

 

Calls to be made

School classes now have the chance to get the special experience of telephoning in the old-fashioned way. Through a new role playing pupils from 3rd to 7th grade will be able to get acquainted with telecommunication as it took place in the early years of telephony, 1880-1920. In our permanent exhibition we have put up six nice "telephone boxes" decorated with Copenhagen motifs. The pupils are given different roles and will call each other on original old telephones and get to know people from Copenhagen of that time.

All calls are handled through the exchange and the telephone operator. It may require some patience waiting to be connected and perhaps the telephone operator is listening in during the conversation.

At the exchange the pupils get a unique possibility to become tele-phone operators and connect the subscribers with each other at original switchboards.

Concentration

The educational course "Telephone Operator for a Day" gives the pupils exceptional insight in Den-mark as before the mobile phones, the Internet and all the other things which we take for granted today. The pupils will experience that it requires concentration to use telephones and switchboards from the infancy of telephony. They will also find out that extremely much has happened within tele-communication from the first telephone saw the light of day in 1876 to the wireless connections of our time.

The educational course "Telephone Operator for a Day" can be ordered from December 2006. (In Danish only).