We are accustomed to think of Cornwall as an economically backward part of the UK and of British industry as relatively bad at 'high-tech' activities. However, the county has been the focal point of generations of very sophisticated telecommunications technology from the middle of the nineteenth century, with its major telegraph stations at Porthcurno, Poldhu and the Lizard, to mid-twentieth century and the operation of the Satellite Earth Station at Goonhilly Down. These activities are commemorated in a small number of museums in Cornwall, but the telecommunications heritage is too little known and some of the locations are already falling into disrepair. This project seeks to make Cornwall's telecommunications history more visible. At the core of the project is a major new exhibition for the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, which was the training station for the Eastern Telegraph Company and successor companies. The museum already has an outstanding display of working telegraph machinery and technology but lacks major exhibits on the nineteenth century and the lives of the workers in this industry. The basic materials for such an exhibition are available in the museum's archive in the form of employment and work records, operating reports, maps and plans of various overseas telegraph stations and an extensive collection of images of both the telegraph school at Porthcurno and out-stations.\n\nThis project will support research in the Porthcurno archive (and in the BT archive in London) that will uncover the story of the life at the telegraph training school at Porthcurno and how this prepared workers for life in the often very harsh conditions of out-stations in the Empire. We will examine how recruitment worked in this sector, how workers were trained and retrained as technology changed and work practices were modified. Although we tend to think of the telegraphist's work as relatively easy, for those in the out-stations life was very uncomfortable and prone to physical and stress-related illness. The new exhibition will explore all these issues. Porthcurno itself is a very isolated location, and the research will explore the effect of this location on the culture of telegraph workers. There is ample evidence of a very masculine work culture overlain with imperial sentiments.\n\nSupporting the new exhibition will be a major website that will display the results of the research in different ways for different users. For academic historians of technology, business and work there will be a searchable database of the cultural, economic, social and technological aspects of work and training at Porthcurno. The website will also contain virtual tours of other Cornish communications sites and downloadable podcasts for those visiting the other sites where little tourist and historical information is available. For schools, the team will bring its experience of creating an educational resource that meets the needs of key stages in the history, science and geography curricula, as well as providing for academic researchers information about materials held at the Porthcurno archive.\n\nUnderpinning these museum materials will be scholarly publications and presentations. This will include conference papers for the Society for the History of Technology, the annual conference of the Business History Society and related organisations. The team will prepare a series of articles for leading academic journals in the history of work, technology and business and will use this material for a monograph on the telecommunications industry in Cornwall from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the First World War. This will be a completely different approach to the history of telecommunications, which has hitherto been dominated by the publications of technical enthusiasts and commissioned company histories. In essence, we will produce for this critical phase in its development a history of the industry from the bottom up.

Based on the work carried out for the 'Augmented Telegrapher: Mixed Reality in a Museum Context' project, we propose to extend our collaboration with both Porthcurno Telegraph Museum [PTM] and Cornwall Museum Partnership [CMP] to help tackle some of the Museum's key economic and interpretational areas of challenge. It became apparent through our previous collaboration that our experimental and investigative work could be leveraged, if commercially optimised, to help the museum to bring in footfall during the low season months as well as provide an additional highly marketable attraction for the public in the high season months. Part of this work is therefore also to provide means using the latest Augmented and Mixed Reality technology to help audiences, and particularly the under-engaged 16-30 age group, to engage enjoyably and meaningfully with the importance of the location and the collections within the museum. Our aim then is to attract, surprise and delight audiences with the availability of creative and innovative uses of immersive technology that will bring to life a unique location steeped in telecommunications heritage. To aid in the process of attracting visitors and in the development of a new income stream we will use a range of existing assets and designs to create a commercial, group-based 'Escape Room' type offering that can be booked across the winter months to bring in a new income stream. In close collaboration with our partners, existing digital assets will be optimised and polished, and made ready to be used to develop an online platform designed to better attract the interest of the under-engaged market. These assets will also be used to integrate Mixed Reality methods with the permanent collection with the aim of connecting past experiences of the impact of communications on daily lives with those experienced in our internet age. These additions provide therefore the basis for new income streams and business model for the Museum, helping to tackle some of its economic, thematic and cultural challenges.

As the centenary of the First World War approaches we can no longer draw upon the testimony of first-hand witnesses. Historians now more than ever need to scrutinise anew primary sources to develop fresh interpretations. This project considers in unprecedented depth the crucial role of innovative telecommunications in battlefront strategy, a topic previously devolved solely to signals historians. Hitherto, little scholarly attention has been paid to the (open or secret) patenting of such new communications devices, their strategic value in combat, or the sometimes enormous profits they generated. The capacity of military units to communicate securely, i.e. without interception, has underpinned successful combat strategy for centuries, and the First World War was no exception. The vulnerability of telecommunications was well illustrated by the British interception of the Zimmerman telegram from Germany in 1917. Yet in contrast to the popular Second World War stories of Bletchley Park's interception and breaking of Enigma codes, these issues have not been systematically explored in any public or academic history of First World War Britain. While recent historians (such as Gary Sheffield) have certainly reasserted the inventiveness and adaptability of the British forces during the First World War, such revisionist accounts have not extended to the inventive production and use of telecommunications, nor to the issues of intellectual property that they involved. A fortiori these issues are not covered in any military or civilian museum exhibits, nor in extant online teaching resources. Inroads have recently been made, however, by Gooday's AHRC project (2007-10) 'Owning and Disowning Invention' in understanding how intellectual property systems operated in the First World War. This Follow-On project will work in collaboration with the Oxford Museum of History of Science, and three project partners (Institution of Engineering and Technology, Porthcurno Telegraph Museum and BT Archives) to create public-facing resources on four specific themes: i) battle strategy in the First World War at times depended in important ways both on innovative (if risky) use of civilian-originated telecommunications (telegraph, telephone, radio) and on new combat-inspired technologies such as the Fullerphone, developed in 1915-16, in order accomplish secure communications in the face of innovative enemy techniques of interception. ii) patterns of innovation in First World War telecommunications need to be understood within the patent system for managing intellectual property rights. These extend both to the rights of the state over those of civilian and military patentees, and the pressure put on the management of that system by the priorities of war. Only by this means can we understand how the Fullerphone was produced for the British and other armies as the subject of a secret patent in 1916. iii) there was a subtly differentiated range of rewards available for militarily useful innovations in telecommunications: patent royalties, government purchase, promotion, medals or post hoc awards from the Royal Commission etc. The Fullerphone acts once again as an ideal case study, since most of such rewards were accrued by its inventor, Algernon Clement Fuller. iv) after the Great War difficult questions arose regarding the legitimate profit from wartime manufacture. The project resources focus on an important yet little studied case: the Marconi company's long legal dispute with the State over mass wartime 'infringement' of its wireless telegraphy patent rights, the large settlement from which funded the creation of the Cable and Wireless Co. This proposal is modelled on the PI's recent AHRC-funded Knowledge Transfer Project partnered with the Thackray Museum in Leeds, "Patently Innovative: Re-interpreting the history of industrial medicine" AH/I027339/1, also drawing on 'Owning and Disowning Invention'.