The Queen has proved she is in touch with the touch screen by sharing her first Instagram post in the latest personal technological milestone of her lengthy reign.

The 92-year-old monarch shared an archive image to the 4.6 million followers of @theRoyalFamily’s Instagram account during a visit to the Science Museum to formally open the new Smith Centre and summer exhibition, Top Secret.

Little expertise was required as she merely had to touch an iPad screen before a gathering of applauding guests.

The image was a photograph of a letter written in 1843 to her great-great-grandfather Prince Albert from Charles Babbage, credited as the world’s first computer pioneer.

The Queen’s typed post, signed Elizabeth R, said “it seems fitting to me that I publish this Instagram post, at the Science Museum which has long championed technology innovation and inspired the next generation of inventors”.

It was at the Science Museum that the Queen first demonstrated her Twitter skills by posting her first tweet in 2014 – though there was some speculation that the actual physical posting was executed through the nimble fingers of a royal flunkey standing nearby.

Buckingham Palace is always eager to highlight the Queen’s past technological firsts. Aides point to her having made the first phone trunk call from Bristol to Edinburgh back in 1958. And long before the world wide web invaded every home, she became the first monarch to send an ‘email’ during a 1976 visit to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern using ARPANET, the computer network which eventually morphed into the internet.

More recently, she uploaded a video to YouTube during a visit to the Google offices in London, one year after she launched the first official British royal family channel on YouTube.