Scranton (Pennsylvania) Republican, September 29, 1910, page 2:
NO PRIVATE WIRES ON NEWS TELEPHONE
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Local Men Are Interested In Installing New System of Spreading the News.
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SERMONS OVER WIRES
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J. A. McClary, of New York, is in this city, representing a new telephone system, which will differ from the present systems in that the phones will be for "listening only" and will be used to disseminate news bulletins, base ball scores, weather reports, sermons, standard time and musical concerts. The project contemplates the merging of the Jackson News Bureau with the new system, and all the local capital necessary to finance the proposed company has already been secured, it is said.
The new telephone system to be introduced in this city, is in extensive operation in Budapest, Hungary, where its inventor lives, and in London, Paris and Berlin. It is known there as the Telephone Herald, and consists of hundreds of instruments placed in hotel waiting rooms, clubs, hospitals, homes and sick rooms, all operated from one central exchange, and which carry news bulletins of all kinds at hourly intervals.
It is proposed that the local system will be operated from Carbondale to Hazleton, touching all the intermediate cities and towns and that five minutes after each hour the latest news will be disseminated to all the subscribers.
By means of the new system, it is said, Sunday sermons in churches can be plainly heard in hospitals, sick rooms and private homes. Opera music, concerts and singing can be carried to all parts of the city and county, and election returns announced in hundreds of homes as soon as they are received at the central exchange. An instrument called the microphone, placed in churches or concert halls, gathers all the sound, and, through the central exchange, it is sent over the wires into the homes of the subscribers.