This was an event without
precedent.

Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very well.
They're experimental, and therefore half-baked and rather frazzled.
The prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it
ought to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the
inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and pundits
may have very firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are
often very wrong.

The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in the
popular press. Infant technologies need publicity and investment money
like a tottering calf need milk. This was very true of Bell's machine.
To raise research and development money, Bell toured with his device as
a stage attraction.

Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone showed
pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread. Bell's stage
telephone was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole
contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown Brownie camera.
Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was
loud enough to fill an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who
could manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the
organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was
considered marvellous, but very eerie indeed.

Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a couple
of years, was that it would become a mass medium. We might recognize
Bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable radio."
Telephones at a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons,
and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up
subscribers.

At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In fact,
Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the
telephone was successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest,
for decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a
government-run information service called "Telefon Hirmondo-."
Hirmondo- was a centralized source of news and entertainment and
culture, including stock reports, plays, concerts, and novels read
aloud. At certain hours of the day, the phone would ring, you would
plug in a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon Hirmondo-
would be on the air--or rather, on the phone.

Hirmondo- is dead tech today, but Hirmondo- might be considered a
spiritu