How it began
Tivadar Puskas launched the Telefon Hirmondo, the Telephone Herald, in Budapest in mid-February 1893. It delivered spoken news and entertainment to subscribers over telephone lines. Puskas died on March 16, 1893, a month after the launch, and others carried the service on. It was both the first telephone newspaper and the one that lasted longest.
How it works
At first the service used the lines of the local telephone company. It then built its own one-way network that divided Budapest into 27 districts, with a main wire to each district and branch wires to houses. Since there was no vacuum tube amplification, announcers with especially loud voices, called stentors, spoke into double receivers. Wires also ran from microphones in the Opera House. At home, subscribers listened through two earphones on flexible cords, and a loud buzzer signaled important announcements.
How it spread
The system was licensed abroad. The Araldo Telefonico opened in Rome in 1910 and passed 1,300 subscribers by 1914. In the United States, Manley Gillam set up the United States Telephone Herald Company in 1909, with short-lived services in Newark, New Jersey in 1911 and 1912 and in Portland, Oregon in 1912 and 1913. Technical limits kept the original service to the city of Budapest.
What changed first
The day began with a news bulletin and summaries of the newspapers, followed by hourly news, stock exchange quotations, parliamentary reports, weather and sports results. Evenings brought opera and theater relays, concerts, readings, lectures and language lessons. Subscribers rose from 60 in 1893 to 700 in 1894, 4,915 in 1895 and about 15,000 in 1907.
What lasted
The Telefon Hirmondo was the first service to deliver a wide range of spoken and musical programming electronically to a general audience. The company was given the right to set up the first radio station in Budapest, which began on December 1, 1925. After that the wire network mostly relayed radio programs, and it had 91,079 subscribers in 1930. The network was destroyed in the Second World War and the service ended in 1944.
