On Thursday 8th September, the country went into mourning after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, the UK’s longest reigning monarch. She had a huge impact on so many people throughout her 70 years on the throne, and she saw major technological changes during her time as Queen. She embraced these changes and became an advocate for the advancements of technology and communication. In this article, we look at how she embraced the tech revolution and the changes we saw to our royal family as a result.
Image courtesy of Buckingham Palace
Television and Radio
When the Queen took the throne in 1952, life and technology was incredibly different to how it is as we know it today. Computers existed but were very rare and few people had access to them. In 1953, sales and rentals of TV sets soared, as her ground-breaking coronation was the first of its kind to be shown on TV, with 27 million people tuning in in the UK alone. For many people, this was the first time they’d watched anything on television.
In 1957, the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day was the first one to be televised, something today we take for granted as the norm. 25 years before that day, her grandad, George V made the first radio-broadcasted King’s speech in 1932.
The Queen often used television and radio to become a familiar face for her nation, as she knew that typically the royal family were seen as an austere and hidden institution. Even before she became Queen, she made a radio broadcast with her sister Princess Margaret during WW2, broadcasting messages of hope and comfort for children across the Commonwealth.
The internet
On the 26th March 1976, the Queen sent her first email using a military machine which would lead to the internet as we know it today. Over twenty years later in 1997, she launched the royal family’s official website. Later that year, her Christmas broadcast was published on the internet, the first of its kind to do so. In 1999 when the Queen made her broadcast on the cusp of the Millennium year, just a quarter of UK households had access to the internet. 13 years later in 2012, when her Christmas message was transmitted in 3D, one quarter of households did not have the internet.
In 2007, the Queen made her first video call of many, speaking to the astronauts who were on board the International Space Station via a video link. Video calling was to become a huge part of her role during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing her to do many important meetings and addresses via video calling. On a call with KPMG in 2020 congratulating them on 150 years, she declared “Thank goodness for technology, so one can still do this.”
Of course, social media has become hugely important during the Queen’s recent reigning years. In 2008, the queen uploaded the first video to the royal family’s YouTube channel. The video can still be viewed today, it’s a short video showing some of the garden parties at Buckingham Palace. The Queen didn’t stop there though, in 2014, she posted her first tweet on Twitter. Five years later in 2019 she posted a photo to the royal family Instagram of a letter she found when visiting the Science Museum. She signed the caption “Elizabeth R”.
In June of this year, we celebrated the Queen’s 70th anniversary of becoming monarch with the Platinum Jubilee weekend. The weekend saw huge advancements in technology, with the Queen herself featuring in a heartwarming sketch with a CGI animation of Paddington bear. On Saturday 4th June, a huge concert took place outside Buckingham Palace honouring the Queen’s reign. Throughout the evening, we saw huge advancements in technology with drones, projections and holograms, showing just how far technology has come in the 70 years she has reigned.
Queen Elizabeth’s reign will go down in history as the UK’s longest and arguably the most historic. Liz Truss rightly said that she was “the rock” on which modern Britain was built on. The technological advancements we’ve seen in those 70 years will continue to change the world as we know it.
Read our guide to find out the history of women in tech.
