Happy 100th Birthday, Sound Bite Era

Thanks to some nuts in NY and NJ — especially the Edison fellow in NJ — the sound bite era was born a hundred years ago, in 1908.

According to Science News, “In New York City, an enterprising businessman set up a penny arcade featuring a Bryan-Taft [1908 presidential] ‘debate.’ Mannequins stood before a phonograph that spouted the candidates’ voices…”

Excerpts from the article:

The phonograph was invented in 1877. By the early 1890s, it was being used in arcades and exhibition halls…

Harold Voorhis…, an agent for the National Phonograph Company…had brought a phonograph into the library of [congressman and presidential candidate William Jennings] Bryan’s house in Lincoln, Neb., to record some of his speeches…

[T]he 1908 campaign was the first in which presidential candidates recorded their own voices for the mass market. …an advertisement in the September 1908 Edison Phonograph Monthly exclaimed[:] “Now, for the first time, one can introduce the rival candidates for the Presidency in one’s own home, can listen to their political views, expressed in their real voices, and make comparisons.”

The sound-bite era was born…

“You could draw a genealogy from the televised presidential debates of today straight back to these” recordings, says record historian Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington.

Read more, see more images, even listen to the 1908 sound bites themselves by clicking thru to the Science News feature.

Image credit: Science News/A. Nandy

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