How Queen Elizabeth embraced new technologies during her reign

Television, space exploration, and even Zoom—the British monarch was an eager advocate for these advancements and more over her 70-year rule.

In the late 1990s, the world fell in love with email. The world was a little late: Queen Elizabeth II had been sending email for decades. In 1976, just years after email was developed as a way for academics to send messages within universities, the queen sent her first email at an event celebrating the arrival of an early internet network in England—and beat most of the rest of the world to the punch by two decades.

It was only fitting: During her nine decades of life, seven of which she spent on the throne, the queen saw enormous technological, social, and scientific change. As the longest-reigning British monarch, she became the beloved head of state for

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