Technology and the 19th century church

MANY, perhaps most, churches have been experimenting with or expanding their use of new technology to present the opportunity of worship to people during this period where restrictions or complete bans on worship have been in place.

Here in Alva, a weekly service put online from March 2020 onwards is also available over the phone for people without online access.

It is slightly disconcerting though to discover that our neighbouring Clackmannanshire village of Tillicoultry began doing this 140 years ago!

In his Reminiscences of Dollar and Tillicoultry, published in 1882, William Gibson has this to say about the new invention of the telephone:

‘The services of the sanctuary, also, can be enjoyed by invalids in their beds, at great distances away from the church, through this great discovery; and our great townsman, James Paton, Esq., Tillicoultry, has for the last twelvemonth been indebted to it for hearing all the services in the U.P. Church; and a whisper, or even a loud sigh, can be heard distinctly through it. The singing of the choir, too, with all the different parts, is distinctly heard.'

The Managers’ Minutes of the church for March 7 1881 show a letter being received asking for ‘the erection of a telephone in the church’ for Mr and Mrs Paton and the request was unanimously agreed. Mr Paton, then in his mid 80s, died the following year leaving £135,000, which included legacies to the minister and to the congregation.

The arrival of the telephone in Scotland in the mid-1870s caused a great stir; perhaps the nearest modern equivalent would be the wonder at the power of the internet in the 1990s. There were many reports of the various experiments and installations in the newspapers of the day, although one leading experimenter in the field commented that ‘for effectually working the telephone, a voice needs special training’.

Demonstrations of the wondrous new invention were arranged and the churches were to the fore in providing their members with opportunities to see it in action. Cowgate Free Church Bazaar in January 1878 included ‘among its other attractions a telephone communicating with No 34 St Andrew Square’, while Bonnington United Presbyterian Church went further with exhibitions not only of the telephone and the phonograph, but also ‘an electric light apparatus’.

These demonstrations were probably not mounted with an idea of the telephone being installed in the church, but it was not long before the possibilities were explored. In April 1879 the John Bull quoted from the Manchester Guardian an ‘interesting experiment’ in a Congregational Church in Halifax. A ‘telephone transmitter’ was installed in the church and four telephones were connected to it in Manchester:

‘Precisely at half past ten, the service commenced with the singing of a hymn, which was reproduced through the telephone almost perfectly, the sonorous voice of Dr Mellor being heard above that of the congregation. Afterwards there was prayer and the usual lessons; but we pass at once to the sermon, which was regarded as the crucial test of the instrument. The results were, on the whole, very encouraging.’

In this case the microphone had been placed in the pulpit, almost at Dr Mellor’s feet, so that when he leaned over the pulpit or turned his head, clarity was lost. Soon it would appear that the problems had been ironed out, for the Scotsman reported in November 1879 that Dr Mellor’s service two months previously had been heard in five different places by a total of twelve listeners. It was reported the service generally was heard with great clearness by ‘the distant members of the congregation’.

The placing of the microphones was clearly both an practical issue and an aesthetic one, Doctor Mellor’s was placed out of sight in the pulpit; the same year it was reported that in a Congregational Church in Ohio the telephone was placed within a floral decoration on the table at the front of the platform and was not at all noticeable.

Meanwhile, in an unidentified church in Edinburgh, when an ‘invalid gentleman’ set up a line between his house and his church, ‘sounding chambers’ were placed on either side of the pulpit to convey the voice of the preacher, while another in the gallery picked up the singing of the choir and congregation. The experiment was deemed a success, and the reporting newspaper, Funny Folks; a weekly budget of funny pictures reported that there was nothing like the telephone for bringing the preacher’s words right home. 

 

Photo: iStock

Funny Folks was intrigued by the notion of telephones in church. The previous year it had reported that the American preacher Henry Ward Beecher (the father of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) suffered from interference caused by there being far too many telephones on the circuit. Further investigation showed that the wire had been tapped and ‘a considerable number of telephones “smuggled in”.

Others though explored the idea that telephonic church services might make preachers redundant. As early as 1877, ‘It is clear’, wrote one correspondent in the Sporting Gazette ‘that a single person may by telephonic aid, perform all the services in London’.

Heavy-handed humour perhaps reached its zenith in a piece placed in, of all things, the Fishing Gazette in 1880. It reported:

Time AD, 1900. The necessity for church-going and edifices is almost dispensed with. The Rev. Dr. Turgid, from the central edifice of the Sacred Telephone, preaches every Sunday to five thousand families of his persuasion in the privacy of their homes. The musical adjuncts to his service, vocal and instrumental, are also dispensed by telephones, and as wafted to the five thousand homes by electricity each family joins in the hymn. The average attention to the service is much greater now than a quarter of a century since, as the ladies have not each other’s dresses and bonnets to look at.

Which brings us to the present. Given the circumstances of declining numbers of ministers, restrictions on the numbers in church and the recent reliance on the internet for services, will what was suggested satirically in 1880 come to pass? Probably not, for ‘where two or three are gathered together’ does not visualise the two or three only being in a family ‘bubble’ and there is no substitute for the fellowship of physical contact with fellow Christians, but it is thought-provoking that 140 years ago, the Victorians recognised the possibilities that modern technology can provide for churches. ¤

“Demonstrations of the wondrous new invention were arranged and the churches were to the fore in providing their members with opportunities to see it in action.