The Messed Up Truth Of Queen Victoria

It's difficult to imagine the awe with which the Victorians must have greeted the advent of the telephone. The ability, as The Telegraph reportsone advertisement explained it at the time, to "converse miles apart, in precisely the same manner as though they were in the same room," must have appeared like a rare voodoo indeed.

It's difficult to imagine the awe with which the Victorians must have greeted the advent of the telephone. The ability, as The Telegraph reports one advertisement explained it at the time, to "converse miles apart, in precisely the same manner as though they were in the same room," must have appeared like a rare voodoo indeed.

For someone who ruled over the industrial revolution and was the first British royal to ride in a train, it's only fitting Queen Victoria had a ringside view of this high magic when it first changed the world. According to Island Echo, on January 14, 1878, Alexander Graham Bell conducted a significant moment in the smartphone and internet's origin story when he demonstrated exactly how the phone worked to Her Royal Highness. It was the first time the UK had publicly witnessed a long-term call and minds were blown and eyebrows raised. The Queen was so taken with Bell's invention she became the first European monarch to own one. God alone knows what she would have made of the World Wide Web and social media. Would she have been big on Twitter one wonders?

First impressions count, and after his initial meeting with the monarch, History Extra reports, Bell wrote a letter to his wife describing Victoria as, "humpy, stumpy, and dumpy," with "red, coarse, and fat hands" and a "fat and florid" face. It's not the most flowery description of a royal ever committed to paper.

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