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Natural Sciences     Social Sciences     Humanities     Arts     Applied Arts and Sciences     Recreation An encyclopedia project—and more! Welcome to Citizendium, an endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness through a unique collaboration between Authors and Editors. We welcome people from all walks of life who want to share their knowledge and expertise freely by writing well-researched and authoritative articles. Please read through our easy registration procedures, then join us. We have 17,243 articles at different stages of development, of which 0 are expert-approved. Eduzendium students in higher education write here as part of their courses. We welcome everyone who has knowledge, broad or narrow, about any subject. Our community is collegial and congenial; everyone writes under his or her real name. Even this, our home page, can be edited by any Citizen. Sign up—we need both Authors and Editors. Get started: How to collaborate | CZ:Quick Start We have a Charter to provide a framework for governing Citizendium. See our own Citizendium article for our history Why Citizendium?; Myths and Facts; Why we contribute to CZ Follow us on our blog, on Friendfeed, Twitter (new drafts or general news) or Facebook Join us Join up here and start a new article or improve existing ones. See Recent Changes—an overview of articles we are writing now. Wikipedians are very welcome! Comment on articles nominated for approval. You can discuss any article on its Talk page. From HERE, you can get started, get technical help, see our policies, and explore our articles and organization. Our help system (still under development) We Need Support From Donations! Please help! We have a continuing need for funds to pay for hosting our servers. See our Financial Report as of March 15, 2011 for complete details. Please make your donations here. See also our sister project, WatchKnow, a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video website.

Some of our finest Approved Articles (0) Developed Articles (1,143) (17,243 total articles) Every minute of every day, millions of curious apes click billions of links, each tracing their own miniature voyages of discovery. — Martin Robbins in a blog post for The Guardian        —add a quotation about knowledge or writing •Today in History | •Did You Know? Featured Article about 1901 photograph of a stentor (announcer) at the Budapest Telefon Hirmondó. Telephone newspaper is a general term for the telephone-based news and entertainment services which were introduced beginning in the 1890s, and primarily located in large European cities. These systems were the first example of electronic broadcasting, and offered a wide variety of programming, however, only a relative few were ever established. Although these systems predated the invention of radio, they were supplanted by radio broadcasting stations beginning in the 1920s, primarily because radio signals were able to cover much wider areas with higher quality audio. History After the electric telephone was introduced in the mid-1870s, it was mainly used for personal communication. But the idea of distributing entertainment and news appeared soon thereafter, and many early demonstrations included the transmission of musical concerts. In one particularly advanced example, Clément Ader, at the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition, prepared a listening room where participants could hear, in stereo, performances from the Paris Grand Opera. Also, in 1888, Edward Bellamy's influential novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 foresaw the establishment of entertainment transmitted by telephone lines to individual homes. The scattered demonstrations were eventually followed by the establishment of more organized services, which were generally called Telephone Newspapers, although all of these systems also included entertainment programming. However, the technical capabilities of the time meant that there were limited means for amplifying and transmitting telephone signals over long distances, so listeners had to wear headphones to receive the programs, and service areas were generally limited to a single city. While some of the systems, including the Telefon Hirmondó, built their own one-way transmission lines, others, including the Electrophone, used standard commercial telephone lines, which allowed subscribers to talk to operators in order to select programming. The Telephone Newspapers drew upon a mixture of outside sources for their programs, including local live theaters and church services, whose programs were picked up by special telephone lines, and then retransmitted to the subscribers. Other programs were transmitted directly from the system's own studios. In later years, retransmitted radio programs were added. During this era telephones were expensive luxury items, so the subscribers tended to be the wealthy elite of society. Financing was normally done by charging fees, including monthly subscriptions for home users, and, in locations such as hotel lobbies, through the use of coin-operated receivers, which provided short periods of listening for a set payment. Some systems also accepted paid advertising. Footnotes