Why did people sound differently when addressing the public in the early 1900s?
I notice that people used to speak not necessarily more clearly, or distinctly, but their voice had a certain 'choppiness' to it that you don't hear anymore... Unless the person doing the speaking is doing it purposefully to sound old-timey. (Think of the narrator in the movie UP by pixar)
Here is an example of the speech type I am talking about:
President Eisenhower ~1964
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cadillacsquareexcerpt.ogg
Here, in a 1950s newsreel, the newsman is speaking this way
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2lYjgLwtII
It doesn't seem to be limited to just the United States either:
Various Newsreels - 1950s Germany, England, USA 220857-04
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wW9CvJxuh8
I know that it can be attributed to 'times change', but I would just like to know why public speakers, and news anchors, etc have started using 'normal' sounding speech. It is somewhat of a shame this type of speech is slowly going away. The last place I currently hear speech of this type is during baseball games.
The choppiness is not only due to the video types they had at the time but also due to reading from paper speaches or speaking off the fly. They didn't have teleprompters til at least early 2000 and they didn't have audio/visual enhancers so what you heard was their voice and the background noise.
