Journalist Hamilton Wright described the apparatus:
"As one talks into the receiver a thin steel wire is magnetized at the actual point of contact with the needle. The wire...runs between two small revolving drums, which will take down 75 minutes of continuous conversation."
Poulsen obtained patents on his Telegraphone in a number of nations, and even founded an American Telegraphone Company in 1903, with a manufacturing plant in Wheeling, West Virginia. Efforts to market the Telegraphone as a business office dictation machine met with little success, but a number of Telegraphones were marketed to railroads through Western Union Telegraph as recording devices for Morse telegraph messages. Correspondence in the Lemuelson Collection of Western Union at the Smithsonian Institution attests to use of Telegraphones on the P. and R.railroad, the Northern Pacific railroad, the L. and N. and the D. and H. Railroads, One can surmise the Telegraphone drew AT&T's attention, as a version was offered that could answer an unattended telephone - even in 1903! American Telegraphone moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in 1910, then went into bankruptcy receivership in 1918, never to emerge; only to finally close in 1944 following Poulsen's 1942 death. Other interests, however, benefited and prevailed from Poulsen's original concepts, even during his firm's bankruptcy. Not the least was AT&T, which began delving into magnetic recording in 1930. Bell Telephone Laboratories initiated a major research effort in magnetic tape recording under the direction of Clarence N. Hickman. By 1931, prototypes designs were made for a steel tape telephone answering machine, a central-office message announcer, an endless loop voice-training machine, and a portable, reel-to-reel recorder for general purpose sound recording. None were said to enter production except for the voice trainer, which failed in the marketplace. AT&T's official policy on telephone recording devices was that they would not be allowed on public telephone lines. (4)
It just so happened that by 1915 Telegraphone-originated high speed transmissions raised the curiosity of radio experimenter Charles Adgar in New Jersey when WW1 was still a European war. Adgar, when one day playing back recordings of the US - German link, let the spring wind down on his Edison machine. Messages from Sayville became readable. The inexperienced United States of America hardly knew what to do about a German-owned radio station sending the message on May 7, 1915 telling German submarine U-39 to "get Lucy," ordering the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania. The U.S. Navy moved very slowly, first putting Marine guards around the Telefunken properties, then placing naval officers as censors in the stations. A minor scandal erupted when it was discovered the Germans were wining and dining young naval officers to keep them off their censoring jobs while sending coded messages to and from Berlin. A final straw was a copy of the infamous "Zimmerman letter," in which the German Foreign Minister encouraged Mexico to attack the United States, to divert attention from the European war. Poulsen's Telegraphone was regularly used in all these transmissions. On intercepting the Zimmerman message, the US Navy seized the Sayville and Tuckerton plants of Telefunken, ultimately expropriating them after the war. Finally, when GE and Westinghouse joint ventured the Radio Corporation of America, the stations were given to the new RCA as part of reparations for the war. Poulsen, who obviously knew of his machine's involvement in that action, may indeed have felt like our tragic hero, Doctor Frankenstein.