For now, suffice it to say that it was simple farmers in the early 1900s who pioneered the use of the phone line for broadcasting long before the rise of radio broadcasting in the 1920s. Burch’s Mesa Telephone Company offered its customers daily broadcasts of weather, train wrecks, and murders, the interval of programming announced by ten short rings. As Kline writes, “Every evening at a designated time, usually seven p.m., an operator would call all farms on a line and give the time, weather and market reports, newspaper headlines and local news, ‘with a spicing
