Radio Diaries artwork

A Voicemail Valentine

Radio Diaries

English - February 11, 2019 18:15 - 14 minutes - 15.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 1.2K ratings
Documentary Society & Culture Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Previous Episode: The Border Wall

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 recently combed through a large collection of early voicemail at the Phono Post Archive, and we discovered that many of these audio letters are about the same thing: Love.