When Is A Howler Not A Howler?

Although this isn't a howler in the strictest sense of its meaning for this blog, I thought that it would be of interest, nonetheless.

The Evening News from Cardiff reported on the 9th October, 1907 that the French telephone authorities had invented a "new and horrible apparatus" which was to be called the "howler".

If you forgot to replace the telephone receiver at the end of a call, the telephone would emit "a sound resembling that of a dog in pain." The paper concluded by predicting that the invention would be useful but unpopular.