The Santa Fe Reporter has a story on the Pulitzer biography that includes an interview with Pulitzer biographer James McGrath Morris. Check out the link to Morris' site where you can hear a recording from 1889. An excerpt from the Santa Fe Reporter
In the cornerstone of the building, when they put it in in 1889, they put a copper box. In it they put a wax cylinder recording of reporters talking. Voices had only been recorded for a few years at that point. In 1955, when the building was torn down, that box fell out and the wax cylinder recording was saved and transferred to tape, and on my website I have a version. You can listen to voices from 1889! And they’re real reporters! They talk about the New York Giants baseball team and they talk about the 1892 exposition. They say, ‘New York’s gonna get the 1892 exposition.’ Of course, it goes to Chicago. So I have the actual recording up on my website.
Across the World newspaper building was the equivalent of Times Square’s ticker tape. People used to come down to the building to read the news. It was put up in chalk across the building. One year there was a yacht race, and they had guys moving model yachts as the telegrams would say who was ahead. People by the thousands stood to watch this.
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