Our attention was drawn to this some months ago, and the clip was reproduced on our social media amidst all the links to online Christmas services. However, the news item is transcribed in full, and reproduced here 131 years after its initial publication on page 8 of the 30 September 1890 edition of 'The Bury and Norwich Post' (a scanned image of the original can be viewed online).
Telephoning the Church Service
The Birmingham Daily Mail announces that the Rev Canon Wilcox, of Christ Church, New Street, has consented to allow the telephone to be introduced into his church, so that certain persons may hear what takes place at the service without personal attendance.
This novel application of the telephone came into use for the first time last Sunday, when the harvest festival commemoration was held at the church, and the listeners at the instrument were able to hear, besides the sermon and the ordinary service, tenor and alto soli by two of the vicars choral of Lichfield Cathedral.
At the end of the choir stalls, on the top of the lectern and the reading desk of the pulpit, were placed small metallic-cased transmitters, arranged that no member of the congregation, unless familiar with the fact, would be led to suspect their real nature. They were so regulated that sound was gathered in without requiring the voice to be directed in close contiguity upon the plate of the transmitter.
This was not the first occasion upon which the telephone has been net up in a place of worship. At Bradford (Yorkshire) it is in use in several places worship other than the Church. It has also been recently introduced at the parish church of Chesterfield, and at all these places subscribers have more or less extensively availed themselves of its use, and it has been found possible for forty or fifty persons to hear a sermon simultaneously.
In one of those churches the pulpit transmitter was placed underneath a cushion covering the stone top, a circular piece being cut out of the cushion for the purpose. One time a strange preacher, not knowing of its existence put his watch in the circular aperture, thinking it to be a receptacle designed for such use. The next day persons who had listened to him through the telephone said they had heard him very well, but they thought he must have been wearing a very loud “ticker,” as it made quite as much sound as he did.
