A Delaware Online article looks at a turn-of-the-last-century era system for transmitting music on demand to telephone users.
The 1910 subscribers called the “music operator” for a transmission and paid 3 cents for each one. Grand opera cost 7 cents, not surprising considering tenor Enrico Caruso did more than any other artist to popularize records. Subscribers had to guarantee $18 a year. Should more than one subscriber request the same record, the telephone exchange could connect many wires to the same phonograph.
Using phone lines to transmit recorded and live music wasn’t that new, said Allan Koenigsberg, a lecturer at Brooklyn College. He has written about the telephone and phonograph and is considered one the most prominent chroniclers of late 19th-century inventions. Yet he had not heard of the Wilmington innovation.
Almost since the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, concerts in Boston and Cambridge were transmitted over phone lines. Koenigsberg said the telephone and phonographs were considered means to disseminate culture to the masses. In Paris in the 1880s, a “theatrophone” brought subscribers live opera performances. Hotels had coin-operated listening areas as far back as 1882.