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This article explores the history of a new technology that appeared in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century: Araldo Telefonico (Telephone Herald), the first institutionalized system for spreading news and entertainment over telephone wires.Araldo Telefonico was a technological result of a period when inventors, entrepreneurs, and others were trying out new applications and seeing telegraphs and telephones in new ways. As such, it provides important insights into Italian media history, and media history in general, for two reasons. First, the history of Araldo Telefonico can help scholars understand the ancestries and continuities of Italian radio: like every new medium, radio didn't suddenly appear during the 1920s. Instead, a few models, genres, and even people central to older technologies became important to the new technology of radio. In this case, Araldo Telefonico may be one of the most influential of these older, precursor technologies for Italian radio. And second, the technology of Araldo Telefonico, emerging as it did between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, played a crucial role in the slow and difficult formation of the concept of "broadcasting," as distinct from the concept of "telecommunications" (or point-to-point communications).
The "circular telephone," as it would later be called, is a little-studied topic in media history not only in Italy, but in the wider field of communications studies; there are three possible reasons for this. First, research on mass media began only after the 1920s, when radio and then television attracted the attention of sociologists and psychologists. Before then, concepts and critical questions related to the diffusion of the same messages to a wide, unspecified audience had not been taken into consideration. In other words, "proto-broadcast" telephone systems were not studied by scholars of the period, and historiographers later took radio to be the first broadcasting medium. Second, research on this topic remains difficult because the circular telephone was, in many ways, simply a kind of telephone: it had receiver tools, cables and lines, subscriptions, and, in Italy and many other countries, its own ministry. Yet it was also a kind of radio music box because it allowed an audience of subscribers to receive a package of information, education, and entertainment directly at home. In other words, the Araldo was one of the...