Telephone newspaper
[3] The concept also appeared in Edward Bellamy's influential 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887, which foresaw audio entertainment sent over telephone lines to private homes.
The initial scattered demonstrations were followed by the development of more organized services transmitting news and entertainment, which were collectively called "telephone newspapers".
However, the technical capabilities of the time — vacuum tube amplification would not become practical until the 1920s — meant that there were limited means for amplifying and relaying telephone signals to multiple sites over long distances, so service areas were generally limited to a single jurisdiction, and in most cases listeners needed to use headphones to hear the programs.
Financing for the systems was normally done by charging fees, including monthly subscriptions for home users, and, in locations such as hotel lobbies, through the use of coin-operated receivers, which provided short periods of listening for a set payment.
Programming often originated from the system's own studios, although outside sources were also used, including local theaters and church services, where special telephone lines carried the transmissions to the distributing equipment.
Although the service received most of its programming from lines run to local theaters, it also included regular five-minute news summaries.
On February 15, 1893 the Telefon Hírmondó, which would become the most prominent and longest-lived of all the Telephone Newspaper systems, began operating in the Pest section of Budapest.
The Telefon Hírmondó was classified and regulated by the Hungarian government as a newspaper, with a designated editor-in-chief legally responsible for content.
Both the Italian Araldo Telefonico and the United States Telephone Herald Company later licensed the Telefon Hírmondó technology for use in their respective countries.
The limited means for signal amplification required that the Telefon Hírmondó employ strong-voiced "stentors" to speak loudly into double-cased telephones, so that they could be heard throughout the system by listeners that used headphones.
[1] Initially the Telefon Hírmondó provided a short hourly news program using subscriber's regular phone lines.
Because this tied-up the subscriber's line, incoming calls could not be received while listening to the Electrophone, although operators were instructed to break-in in case of emergency.
The Tellevent (also spelled Televent) was the first organized attempt to develop a subscription telephone newspaper service in the United States.
Test transmissions throughout the state of Michigan began in 1906, initially "between the theatres, the churches, the Light Guard Armory, the new Penobscot Inn and the residences of several officials of the company".
[18] An early review reported that the service used subscriber's existing telephone lines, and had been recently installed in 100 Detroit homes, connecting them with local theaters.
An extensive daily program was also envisioned, with plans that "there will be a televent at the stock exchange, banks, at the band concerts on Belle Isle, race track, club houses, hotels, library, political headquarters, court rooms, in short, wherever the public wishes to go".
The Tel-musici was initially developed to send requested phonograph recordings, transmitted from a central "music room", to households that listened using loudspeakers called "magnaphones".
Luigi Ranieri, an Italian engineer who represented the Construction Mécaniques Escher Wyss and Company of Zurich, Switzerland, applied for permission to install systems in Rome, Milan, and Naples.
In August 1909 the Italian government authorized a Rome operation,[21] which began service the next year, with a schedule similar to the Telefon Hírmondó's.
[26] An initial transmission demonstration was given at the company headquarters, located at 110 West Thirty-fourth Street in New York City, in early September 1910.
On October 24, 1911 an ambitious daily service, closely patterned after the Telefon Hírmondó's, was launched to a reported fifty receivers located in a department store waiting room, plus five hundred Newark homes.
However, the service quickly ran into serious technical and financial difficulties, which resulted in employees walking off the job due to missed paychecks, and operations were suspended in late February 1912.
[38] The final advertisements for the company appeared in June 1913, and the state corporation charter was terminated on January 16, 1917, for failure to file statements or pay fees for two years.
In 1910 the Automatic Electric Company announced its new loudspeaker, with uses including: "An automatic enunciator, by which a man talking in New York can be heard in every part of a large room in Chicago... may make it possible for a public speaker to address a million or more people at one time... Running descriptions of baseball games, or prize fights can be sent over long distances for the entertainment of sporting fans of all varieties.
[38] An experimental commercial Musolaphone service was established in south-side Chicago in 1913, working in conjunction with the Illinois Telephone & Telegraph Co. John J. Comer, former general manager of the Tel-musici installation at Wilmington, Delaware, was described as the inventor.
An early 1914 report reviewed the Chicago Musolaphone's daily schedule, which began daily at 8:00 a.m., and included news, weather reports, and the exact time at noon, followed by musical programs, "a running description of ball games of the home team and scores by innings of other teams in both leagues during the baseball season", and the "announcement of special bargain sales at the leading stores".
