Musolaphone

The Musolaphone (also marketed as the Multa Musola), developed by the Automatic Electric Company of Chicago, Illinois, was an audio distribution system, which transmitted news and entertainment, over telephone lines, to subscribing homes and business. The company's recently developed "Automatic Enunciator" loudspeakers were employed at the receiving end.

A test commercial installation was established in southside Chicago in 1913, but the project was short-lived and did not prove to be financially successful. This was the last significant attempt to set up a "telephone newspaper" to transmit entertainment over telephone lines in the United States, prior to the development of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s.

In 1910, the Automatic Electric Company, an established firm best known for making automatic telephone switchboards, announced its development of a new loudspeaker, called the "Automatic Enunciator", which was envisioned to have multiple potential uses. In part, Joseph Harris, president of the company, predicted: "An automatic enunciator, by which a man talking in New York can be heard in every part of a large room in Chicago... may make it possible for a public speaker to address a million or more people at one time... Running descriptions of baseball games, or prize fights can be sent over long distances for the entertainment of sporting fans of all varieties."

In 1910 the Automatic Enunciator Company was formed in Chicago to market the invention. Initially, Automatic Enunciators were employed in public address systems, for making announcements in establishments such as department stores, factories, and railroad stations. In 1913, multiple units were installed throughout the Comiskey Park baseball field in Chicago, both for announcements and to provide musical interludes.

The next step was to expand the system to distribute programming to multiple sites, initially under the name "Multa Musola". Company publicity included the following description: "The object of the Multa Musola service is to distribute music by telephone wires from an instrument at the central office, so it can be easily heard in any part of a room without having to listen carefully."

The summer of 1912 saw a series of Multa Musola demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, and in the spring of the next year, advertisements for the Oregon Enunciator Company appeared, promoting both home and business service. This would have competed with another telephone-based news and entertainment service, the Oregon Telephone Herald Company's "telephone newspaper", but there is no evidence that the Multa Musola system ever began operation. Moreover, later that year, Oregon's Corporation Commissioner, R. A. Watson, acting under the state's "Blue Sky" law, prohibited both the Oregon Enunciator Company and the Oregon Telephone Herald Company from doing business in the state, due to concern about their financial viability.

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Wikipedia