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The first sound transmission of a Czech opera.

Article Excerpt
Two years ago Czech Radio celebrated its eightieth birthday (it started transmitting in May 1923), no later than anywhere else. The new invention had spread like an avalanche and the Czechoslovak Republic had been among the first countries to introduce it. Indeed its concessionary network relative to the overall population was soon such as to put it right at the top of the European ladder. From the beginning music had a place on the radio. Even though both with telephones and on the radio the principle is the same--the transmission of sound--today we regard them as two different things. Thirty years before the launch of Czech Radio the inventions of Bell (the telephone) and Marconi (the radio) had been very close. In fact the first "radio" transmission of music took place by telephone.

The telephone was born in 1861, when the German physicist Johann Philipp Ries succeeded in transmitting sound electromagnetically. Alexander Graham Bell improved his invention and in 1876 "developed" the first telephone network. When twenty years later in 1896 Guglielmi Marconi achieved wireless transmission of sound, the two inventions started to go their separate ways. By the 1920s nobody thought of music transmitted by telephone, but around 1891 this had still seemed to be the best possibility.

As early as 1873 we are learning "something about telephony": "What is telephony? By analogy with her sister telegraphics or writing at a distance, we could sum it up as sound at a distance," we read in Hudebni listy [Music News] in 1873. The author of one of the first reports on the new invention immediately starts thinking through the "benefits": "What if I find that a concert programme or individual numbers in it don't appeal to my aesthetic taste, what then? I can easily get rid of the pieces that I don't like by unhooking the wire so the inflow remains halted until the next number."

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It was, however, to be another almost twenty years before technical progress reached a stage at which it was really possible to consider something like the transmission of musical experiences over long distances. In 1890 the idea started to be taken seriously. One of the first lines on which musical...

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