Amplifiers and loudspeakers had become boring in the United States by 1926. Yet they had only been invented a couple of decades earlier. At other points in history, a revolutionary technology like this—one so impactful on the world—would have taken much longer to adopt.
Source: Wireless World (June 30, 1926), 878. Available via Google Books
Select sources
Present-Day Sources about Electronic Amplification and Related Technologies
John Lienhard, Engines of Our Ingenuity (Radio show), “Episode 1323: Fleming’s Electric Valve,” at https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1323.htm, accessed 27 April, 2023.
“Men of Science See De Forest’s Audion,” New York Times, 11 December, 1915.
“Crowd Hears Loan Speech from Plane High in Sky” Washington Times, Final edition, 21 Apr., 1919, 1 & 17.
“A Voice from the Sky,” Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 95, No. 1 (July 1919), 81.
Robert William West, Purposive Public Speaking: A College Text Book for Courses in Public Speaking (New York: Macmillan Company, 1924), 4. https://books.google.com/books?id=dQg2AQAAIAAJ
Shannon Mattern, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6rn.3.
William M. Clements, “From Performance Through Dialogism to Efficacy,” In Oratory in Native North America (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2022), 103–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2pwtmff.8.
Edwin James’ 1823 account of this speech in his book Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, performed in the Years 1819 and 1820, Vol. II (London: Longman, 1823), 32–38. https://books.google.com/books?id=a39kAAAAcAAJasdf
Classical & other early megaphone tubes
Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 187. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc779xn.
“Plates of the Codex Canadensis” in Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet, Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle Des Indes Occidentales, edited by François-Marc Gagnon (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 93–256. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt12f406.7.
Auxetophone ad: The American Magazine, October 1906, [P. 619 of the PDF version—no page numbers seem to be present in the magazine itself https://books.google.com/books?id=6wBKCyuK8goC.
String concert with auxetophone ‘pickups’: “The Auxetophone.” The Musical Times 46, no. 754 (1905): 808–808. http://www.jstor.org/stable/904966.
A website by a man named Douglas Self includes very useful information about compressed-air-based audio amplification. Despite our common initials of Douglas S. and the fact that I sometimes refer to my own person as self, he is not, to the best of my knowledge, me, or directly related to me in any way of which I’m aware. See http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/auxetophone/auxetoph.htm , accessed 10 Apr., 2023.
