09.8

//Source(s): 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 medium: Theatrophonic televangelism**
 * From: From: bruces@well.com (Bruce Sterling)**