On this day … 12 November 1881

The Preston Guardian reported that speeches at a political meeting at the Charnley Street skating rink had been relayed live to subscribers to the town’s newly-established telephone exchange: one of the very first such ‘broadcasts’ in the country, and indeed, the world..

It was only five years earlier in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell had patented his telephone, and at the end of that decade, the first tentative experiments were being made in ‘live transmissions’. The Preston telephone exchange was one of the places where those experiments were being carried out.

The first trials of the telephone in Preston were being reported in 1878. Our post of 9 February carried the Preston Chronicle’s report of one of those trials. The town was fascinated by the possibilities of this new medium, as is perfectly captured in the report.

Amateur scientists had gathered to witness a telephone connection between the India Mill in New Hall Lane and Calvert’s mill in Walton-le-Dale. The experiment was being conducted by George Sharples, who started Preston’s first telephone exchange shortly after. He positioned himself at India Mill, along with a Mr Parker, the managing partner of the two mills. At the other end was fellow experimenter, the photographer Robert Pateson.

See the 9 February post for a longer account of those trials.

George Sharples was probably responsible for the town’s first ‘outside broadcast’ from the skating rink, but little more has been discovered about the event, or about any future events. Does anybody have more information.

By the end of 1879, George Sharples, who combined the roles of electrician, telegraph engineer and chemist at his premises at No. 7, Fishergate, was advertising a ‘telephonic communication service between warehouses, mills, mansions, stables, etc., in Preston’. The first line he put up was for Paul Butler and Son, from their corn warehouse, in Back Lane, to their Parr Croft corn mill, Moor Lane.

Before long he had installed telephone lines for the Preston Corporation, the Preston Gas Company, and the cotton manufacturers Horrockses, Miller, and Co. and W. Calvert and Sons. By 1883 he had 100 subscribers, connected by 118 miles of telephone wires.

Those who had signed up as subscribers by November 1881 would have been able to listen to the speeches at the skating rink on their ‘telephonic devices’.

Similar trials were being carried out in other countries, as for example in France, where, according to Wikipedia, ‘Clément Ader prepared a listening room at the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition, where attendees could listen to performances, in stereo, from the Paris Grand Opera’.

Ader’s experiment was soon established as a regular service:

‘The first organized telephone-based entertainment service appears to be the Théâtrophone, which went into operation in Paris, France in 1890 … Although the service received most of its programming from lines run to local theatres, it also included regular five-minute news summaries. Home listeners could connect to the service, with an 1893 report stating that the system had grown to over 1,300 subscribers. The company also established coin-operated receivers, in locations such as hotels, charging 50 centimes for five minutes of listening, and one franc for twice as long.’

Before long, telephone ‘newspapers’ had been started in a number of European cities. It is not known if George Sharples went on to develop anything similar in Preston.

In a foretaste of the present predictions that online publications will mean the end of printed newspapers, similar predictions were being made at the beginning of the twentieth century, as in this report from a Spanish newspaper correspondent, who saw in such telephone systems:

‘… the newspaper of the future. I firmly believe in the upcoming abolition of the newspaper as it exists today … It is therefore necessary to think about what will replace the written and printed diary. It will be the spoken, telephoned, telephonographed diary.

‘… This is the cradle of the newspaper of the future. The typography, the presses, the linotypes, everything current will seem, before the end of the 20th century, old, heavy, dirty, complicated. The installation of tomorrow’s newspapers will be reduced to a network of threads to communicate with subscribers. An announcer will speak before a special apparatus and the clientele will be served at the same time in London, Paris, Berlin and the provinces.’

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Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone
https://medium.com/swlh/telefon-h%C3%ADrmond%C3%B3-the-19th-century-internet-42914e890