I once stood against the back wall of an enormous hotel ballroom in Denver, enjoying the best science fiction convention I had ever attended. Star Trek: The Next Generation had just finished its first season, and Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard) was attending his first con. For the better part of an hour, he stood on stage telling us story after story about the show, his own acting background, and optimism for the future we all felt was captured by Star Trek.

He didn’t lean against a podium. Instead, he stood casually at the edge of the stage, wearing jeans and a blue work shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow, his arms folded or his hands on hips, just talking. I heard every word, despite my distance from the stage, despite the inevitable sounds made by a crowd that size.

He had no microphone.

This veteran of the live stage stood there speaking, not shouting, and we heard him without a microphone. He had learned to project his voice in such a way that speaking didn’t seem to tire him or make his throat rough, and we heard him.

Maybe some of the speakers in General Conference during the 19th and early 20th century learned the same skill if they spoke often enough. It probably helped somewhat after the Tabernacle was built, and after its builders finally hit on the right combination of interior finishing (including constructing the balcony, and including hanging a forest of greenery from the ceiling) to give the Tabernacle its signature acoustics. But that wouldn’t have helped in sessions held elsewhere, like the Assembly Hall and the Bureau of Information and the overflow sessions in the open air of the Temple Block. Speakers still had to project, or shout, and sometimes audiences struggled to understand. The records of many a Conference talk include an apology for not being able to speak loudly enough, or for cutting a talk short because the speaker’s throat was sore.

I don’t know (yet) when loudspeakers were first installed in the buildings on Temple Square. They had been installed by 1924, and probably hadn’t been there long at that point, because technicians were still trying to find the best placement for microphones and speakers, and the best way to adjust the equipment for the different qualities of voices being amplified.

I don’t know (yet) whether Harvey Fletcher had anything to do with the early use of sound amplification on Temple Square. The brilliant Provo-born and always-LDS physicist certainly had an interest in the kinds of problems faced by the speakers, singers, and audiences in the Tabernacle and other Conference buildings. He didn’t attend Conference in 1924 – by then, he was several years into his work at Western Electric in New York City, later to work at Bell Labs, and still later at Columbia University, before returning to BYU for the final years of his long career. During his years in New York and New Jersey, Dr. Fletcher was credited with developing stereophonic sound recording, the electronic hearing aid, improvements in sound transmission over the telephone, tools to measure hearing (and hearing loss, and the range of sound affected by hearing loss). A steady pattern in his work was, you’ll notice, connected with transmitting the human voice and receiving sound by the human ear – not solely having to do with volume, but particularly having to do with comprehension.

Most of that was still a few years in the future in 1924, but already Dr. Fletcher’s talents and interests were well known. Elder John A. Widtsoe thought so much of what Dr. Fletcher was doing, and the great promise it showed, that when Elder Widtsoe wrote to Dr. Fletcher after October Conference, he opened his letter by saying, “If I am scanning your latest contributions properly you are establishing fundamental principles in one of the most important departments of applied science of the time. I congratulate you upon your success.”

Dr. Fletcher was on Elder Widtsoe’s mind at that moment because of something that had just happened at Conference. On the first day of that Conference, Elder Widtsoe had stepped into the Assembly Hall to listen to the overflow session there. Charles H. Hart, one of the seven presidents of Seventy was speaking. It was an interesting talk, too:

When Abraham Lincoln was a child, residing in the wilds of Kentucky, his prayer was: “Lord, bless father, bless mother, bless sister, bless everybody. Teach me to read, and write. Watch over Honey and make him a good dog, and, Lord, keep us all from being lost in the wilderness.”

Elder Hart compared Lincoln’s childhood wilderness to that of Joseph Smith’s youth, then spoke of the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness, then brought his point home to his 20th century listeners:

It is not particularly of the guidance in the wilderness, the physical wilderness, that I wish to speak … There are other wildernesses, as indicated by the remarks of the brethren this morning. We have the commercial wilderness, the financial wilderness, that men are groping in, and need guidance in, for them to devise ways and means that are honorable in the sight of all men for the support and education of their families. There is the intellectual wilderness in which there is danger of men losing their bearings.

Elder Widtsoe struggled to understand Elder Hart from his position at the back of the Assembly Hall. Loudspeakers had been installed, and Elder Hart was speaking into a microphone, but the sound was all garbled and practically incomprehensible. The loudspeakers, which needed to be adjusted according to the pitch of the speaker’s voice, were unattended. Equipment had been set to amplify the deeper voices of some early speakers, and Elder Hart’s voice was pitched much higher – he had, in Elder Widtsoe’s words, “a somewhat shrill voice, and the amplifier made a chorus of undistinguishable sounds.”

Hurriedly, Elder Widtsoe located the sound engineer – the “operator,” he called him – and sent him to man the controls of the sound system. Elder Widtsoe remained at the back of the Assembly Hall, and with hand signals indicated the success or failure as the operator “regulated the apparatus.”

“He finally found a good place,” Elder Widtsoe reported, “and in a very few seconds, Pres. Hart’s voice came out almost bell-like in its clearness.”

“I am very grateful to the Lord for his guidance to the pioneers in their wanderings in the wilderness,” Elder Hart concluded.

We are in the happy position of being able to sail between the two extremes of the fundamentalist and the modernist, being able to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, so to speak, without striking the rock on the one hand, or being drawn into the whirlpool on the other.

May the Lord bless us and help us to appreciate all that the restoration of the gospel means to us, and all that the guidance by the Priesthood has meant to us and to our fathers, and will mean to our posterity, is my prayer.

That the audience heard with “bell-like” clarity. And soon after, the apostle hastened to share the experience with his friend the physicist. “It is a wonderful age and it seems to me you are in one of the most interesting departments. My hearty good wishes to you always.”