The royal tweet: Queen sends first Twitter message

The Queen has sent her first ever tweet while opening an information technology gallery at the Science Museum.

The message, which went out at 11:35am to 724,000 followers of the @BritishMonarchy account, read: “It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R.”

The account had previously been managed by palace officials.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh arrived on Friday morning at the Science Museum in London to open and tour the UK’s first permanent gallery dedicated to the history of information and communications technology.

Information Age: six networks that changed our world spans 200 years of transformation, from electric telegraphy, broadcasting and telephony to satellite communications, the web and mobile voice and data networks.

Inviting the monarch to open the gallery, the Science Museum director, Ian Blatchford, remarked on how the Queen had harnessed advances in communication technology throughout her reign.

He said: “I mentioned earlier that Queen Victoria took a great interest in the invention of the telephone, and Your Majesty has followed in this tradition of embracing new technology. You made the first live Christmas broadcast in 1957 and an event relished by historians took place on 26 March 1976, when you became the first monarch to send an email, during a visit to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment. May I now invite you to join me so that you may send your first tweet.”

The Queen removed a glove to send the tweet in front of around 600 guests including communications entrepreneurs and experts Lady Lane-Fox, Hermann Hauser, Mo Ibrahim, Professor Steve Furber and Sir Nigel Shadbolt.

The gallery is the first project to emerge from an ambitious masterplan to transform the museum. Next in line is the new mathematics gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid and due to open in 2016. The museum’s medical history gallery, due in 2018, aims to be the largest of its kind.

The Queen’s Twitter debut comes a few months after that of her grandson, Prince Harry, who sent a message on the social network in May to celebrate the forthcoming Invictus Games.

Earlier in the day, the @BritishMonarchy account released a series of tweets about the Queen’s use of novel communications technology during her reign. She made her first televised Christmas broadcast in 1957 in which she spoke about “the speed at which things are changing all around us” .

And the monarch sent her first email in 1976 during a visit to a British army base. It contained the less than thrilling missive: “This message to all arpanet users announces the availability on arpanet of the Coral 66 compiler provided by the GEC 4080 computer at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, Malvern, England.”