Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth

London's Science Museum is "honoured" Queen Elizabeth chose the venue to send her first ever tweet.

The 88-year-old monarch made history earlier today (24.10.14) when she sent her first ever message on social networking site Twitter during a visit to the major tourist attraction with her husband Prince Philip, where they were opening the building's new Information Age gallery.

A tweet on the Science Museum's account in response to Elizabeth's message on the official account of the British Monarch read: "@BritishMonarchy We're honoured The Queen chose to open our Information Age gallery by sending her first tweet #smInfoAge #TheQueenTweets (sic)"

Earlier in the day, the queen wrote: "It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting. Elizabeth R."

Following the historic moment, the British Monarchy account confirmed the message had been sent by the royal, writing: "The last tweet was sent personally by The Queen from her official Twitter account @BritishMonarchy #TheQueenTweets"

Shortly before the queen made history with the tweet, museum director Ian Blatchford invited her to aptly mark the opening of the establishment's Information Age gallery by sending the message.

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 March 26, 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 message is said to have been pre-typed on a tablet computer leaving the monarch to simply press the send button.

However, the queen's tweet may not have gone down too well with her grandson Prince Harry after he recently admitted to "quite hating" Twitter for its "invasion of privacy".

Speaking about whether he would use Twitter during the recent Invictus Games, he said: "I would love to get involved and go on social media, and if it was for causes like this I really would.

"The issue for myself and my family, put quite simply, is that it's very hard for me to tweet about the Invictus Games and tweet about something that means a lot to me, whereas I at the same time really quite hate Twitter by the invasion of privacy. I think you all understand what I'm talking about."

The queen is not the only royal to have tweeted as Princess Beatrice (@yorkiebea) has had an account on the social networking account since November 2011, managing to stay under the radar for many months before the account was given the official Twitter 'blue tick' to recognise it is in fact Beatrice's page.

Her mother Sarah Ferguson is also a keen tweeter and has been on Twitter since May 2011 under the handle @SarahTheDuchess.