A Voicemail Valentine
In this Valentine's Day special we bring you some of the earliest voicemails, about matters of the heart.
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Show Notes
Nowadays we’re very accustomed to recording and hearing the sound of our own voices. But in the 1930s many people were doing it for the first time. And a surprising trend began. People started sending their voices to each other, through the postal service. It was literally voice-mail.
We combed through a large collection of early voicemail at the Phono Post Archive, and we discovered that many of these audio letters have the same subject matter: love.
This story originally aired on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2018.
You can see photographs of the voice-o-graphs on our website: https://www.radiodiaries.org/voicemail-valentine-2022/.
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