(Grand Rapids, Michigan) Evening Press, July 19, 1907, page 5:
TELEVANT IS A WONDERFUL INVENTION
Detroit, July 19.--To be able to sit in one's home, surrounded by one's family and friends and at the same time to enjoy a grand opera performance, to hear a political oration or an appealing sermon, to listen to the latest songs and quips of the vaudeville performers, to hear the announcement of latest bulletins on the news of the day, the weather probabilities, the score of the baseball game, and the returns from the elections.
All these and much more may be made possible by the invention of the "televant," a telephone auxiliary perfected by James F. Land of Detroit, who has just resigned the general management of the Michigan State Telephone company to devote his time to the development of his invention.
The "televant" has been successfully tried out in Detroit for a number of months. Appliances are placed in all the leading theaters, in the foremost churches and in the central offices of the company, through which are transmitted to telephone subscribers the various enjoyments enumerated and others.
At certain hours of the day subscribers to the televant are notified by an automatic signal that the televant has something to communicate. They take down their receivers and they hear perhaps the announcement that a large business block in the city has taken fire and is in danger of destruction, or it may be a dispatch is read to them from Oyster Bay, giving President Roosevelt's latest interpretation of the purpose of the government in sending a fleet of warships to the Pacific. Subscribers who so desire are kept in touch with the Wall street market quotations, receiving at stated times, the latest information of the doings of the bulls and bears.
A special appliance is provided for reproducing and magnifying the sounds of a lecture, sermon or concert, so that not only one person, but an entire family, to say nothing of the neighbors, may sit in a comfortable parlor and participate in the event at less than the cost of a single admission ticket.
It is planned to extend the system throughout the United States, so that in time, the inventor says, people from Maine to Oregon may sit in their homes and hear, if they wish, the actual debates carried on in the halls of congress and other more or less important doings wherever they occur.
Land used to be a messenger boy.
