Where the Deaf May Hear

1896

Many an old lady goes to church of a Sunday and sits through the service in a frame of mind devout to a degree, but never hears a solitary word of the sermon.

There is a preacher in Syracuse, Rev. George B. Spalding, D. D., who has changed all that. Dr. Spalding is pastor of the first Presbyterian Church, a religious body made up in the main of wealthy folk to whom money is no particular object.

Moved at first by the lamentations of some of his aged parishioners that they could not hear his preachments — Dr. Spalding was a newspaper man before he joined the clergy, and is a practical soul withal — he arranged, for the better delivery of the Gospel to those deaf brethren and sisters, speaking tubes which ran from a large metal receiver — really a megaphone immediately in front of him on the pulpit, down under the flooring of the auditorium and up into the pews.

The megaphone is built into the front of the pulpit, so that when reading or speaking the doctor addresses it directly.

So successful did the clergyman's device prove, that speaking tubes were put into every pew in the great auditorium. Any person, who is hard of hearing and happens to be a visitor to the church, will find means at hand of hearing the sermon.

One deaf old lady, who went to Dr. Spalding's church the other day, having heard of the speaking-tube system, burst into tears when she put the transmitter to her ear and caught the sound of the preacher's voice. She said it was the first sermon she had heard in over a quarter of a century. — New York Journal.