It's fascinating to think that sound recording was so new it had to be explained. People needed examples of what someone would record or play back and why.

Every new technology goes through a period like this.

A "humans have always done it" advertisement for modern Internet "education":

"As you might have imagined, there are a lot of parallels between this and the internet in the education wave. Just like RCA, MOOCs (Coursera, Khan Academy, MIT OCW, and Stanford Online) let a kid anywhere access lectures from the best professors in real-time, no longer limited by what's available locally. Both waves bundled hardware and infrastructure, like Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi kits, with a promise of modernization. And finally, both seemed to arrive against the backdrop of a broader consumer technology boom."

The original edutainment?