On 9 June yet another sonic attraction of the Exposition Universelle opened its doors to the public: the telephone display at the pavilion of the Société Générale des Téléphones, where live performances on Parisian stages could be heard through acoustic tubes connected to electronic telephone lines that transmitted the sounds. Together with the exhibition of the Edison phonograph in the Galerie des Machines, the telephone exhibition was among the best-known successes at the Exposition. The listening stations proved to be places of magic and discovery, but also of uncomfortable awe, however tamed within the secure parameters of an industrial fair. To go and listen to sounds that had no immediate source was to catch a glimpse of a future which might well bring with it some if not all of those strange and wonderful inventions so popularized in novels by Jules Verne. The prospect was at the same time enticing and frightening.

Neither the telephone nor the phonograph was entirely new in 1889. Edison's earlier, though disappointing, prototype had been shown in the 1878 Exposition Universelle, and telephonic transmissions from the opera house were already an attraction of the 1881 Exposition Internationale de l’Électricité in Paris. However, what makes their presence in the 1889 Exposition Universelle so central is the fact that here, for the first time, electroacoustic technology became an integral part of an exhibition project conceived as a gigantic taxonomy of human and industrial achievement. Electricity had become one of the main themes of the Exposition, featured not only in the various inventions of the Galerie des Machines, but also, and more visibly, in such installations as the nightly illuminated fountains and the electric lights around the Exposition, especially a spectacular electric light-sculpture by Sautter-Lemonnier and the 20,000 light bulbs that illuminated Edison's exhibit (both also in the Galerie des Machines). While in 1878 electricity was in its “embryonic state,” now it was a full-fledged industrial force in the competitive game of highly developed nations.

The 1889 Exposition Universelle had turned into a celebration of the virtues of Republican France and its meritocracy, embodied in the mythologized figures of the frontier-breaking scientist and the daring explorer.