Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
| 04.1-06.0 | 06.1-08.0 |
08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |
Subject: Dead Media Working Note 09.8
Dead medium: Theatrophonic televangelism
From: bruces_AT_well.com (Bruce Sterling)
Source: WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES WERE NEW: Thinking About
Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century by
Carolyn Marvin
Oxford University Press 1988 ISBN 0-19-504468-1
page 215
"Church services were also an occasion for telephone
transmission. From about 1894, telephone wires connected
subscribers with local pulpits in towns as large as
Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and as small as Paris, Texas.
Inclement weather prompted the Reverend D. L. Coale to
connect a large megaphone to a telephone receiver in the
Anson, Texas, church auditorium where he was conducting a
revival in 1912, so that those absent from services might
receive the benefit of sermons and singing. More than
five hundred were said to have listened to revival
services, and a number of conversions were made by wire.
"Telephone pulpits seemed to have come earlier to
British churches. An account of the inauguration in 1890
of a service in Christ Church in Birmingham with
connection to subscribers in London, Manchester, Derby,
Coventry, Kidderminster, and Hanley went as follows:
"'When the morning service commenced there was what
appeared to be an unseemly clamor to hear the services.
The opening prayer was interrupted by cries of 'Hello,
there!' 'Are you there?' 'Put me onto Christ Church.'
'No, I don't want the church,' etc. But presently quiet
obtained and by the time the Psalms were reached we got
almost unbroken connection and could follow the course of
the services. We could hear little of the prayers ==
probably from the fact that the officiating minister was
not within voice-reach of the transmitter. The organ had
a faint, far-away sound, but the singing and the sermon
were a distinct success.'
"Subscribers in Glasgow listened to their first
telephonic church service in 1892. By 1895 connections
for subscribers and hospital patients had been made to the
leading churches of London, including St. Margaret's,
Westminster; St. Anne's, Soho; and St. Martin's-in-the-
Fields and St. Michael's, Chester Square, by Electrophone
Limited."
Dead
Media | 0.01-02.0 | 02.1-04.0
| 04.1-06.0 | 06.1-08.0 |
08.1-10.0 | 10.1-12.0 |