How old are brief (3 to 7 minute) speech formats?

Superficial research might lead you to believe that brief, 3 to 7 minute, speech formats are a 21st century phenomenon. That’s what I thought back on September 8, 2008 when I blogged about

Recent formats for brief presentations: Lightning Talks, Pecha Kucha, and Ignite. (Lightning Talks and Ignite have a length of five minutes while Pecha Kucha uses six minutes and forty seconds).

Similarly, in an article at Forbes on January 14, 2010 Scott Berkun proclaimed The end of boring presentations. Even Toastmaster magazine (who really should know better) published another article in their May 2018 issue by Dave Zielinski titled Tick – Tock – Tick – Tock and subtitled Fast, fun formats like Ignite and PechaKucha help speakers get to the point. The previous Toastmasters basic Competent Communication manual had eight five to seven minute speeches out of the ten. And most speeches in the current Pathways program also are five to seven minutes. That length goes way back, perhaps to the founding of Toastmasters in 1924. But brief formats are still older.

On August 9, 2010 I blogged about The power of brief speeches: World War I and the Four Minute Men. Back in 1917 Americans spoke in movie theaters while the film reels were being changed. So, a brief speech format (just four minutes) goes back to the time of biplanes, not smartphones. I tried to go even further back via desk-chair research at Google Books and the Internet Archive. 

At the Internet Archive I found that back in 1886 there were two books V1 and V2 of Five-Minute Sermons for Low Masses on All Sundays of the Year (by Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul in New York City). These were their sixth edition. These ‘sermonettes’ first were given toward the close of the year 1876 – in the time of steam locomotives and four decades before the Four Minute Men. In 1891 there was another book by Rev. Richard Newton of Five-Minute Talks for Young People. And in 1896 there was a book by Rev. Clinton Locke, D.D. of Five Minute Talks, followed in 1904 by his book Five Minute Talks second series.     

What about books teaching public speaking (or oratory or elocution)? There was a series of educational handbooks on elocution by Walter K. Fobes, four of which had titles beginning with Five-Minutes. An ad for them appeared in front of the title page for a later edition of his 1877 book Elocution Simplified, as is shown above. In 1886 there was his book of  Five-Minute Readings (for school and college). There also were Five Minute Declamations first part and second part, and Five-Minute Recitations (which is not in the Internet Archive). In 1890 there was a book of Three Minute Declamations for College Men by Harry C. Davis and John C. Bridgman. The Internet Archive has the 3rd revised edition from 1894. In 1897 there was another book of Three Minute Readings for College Girls just by Harry C. Davis. So brief presentation formats really go back to the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth or twenty-first.

In Walter K. Fobes book Elocution Simplified, on page 15, the Acknowledgements include one:
“to Prof. A. Graham Bell of Boston for valuable instruction in articulation and inflection;”
Most of us are more familiar with Bell as the inventor of the telephone.

The cartoon woman using her laptop while sitting on an hourglass was adapted from an image at Wikimedia Commons, while the biplanes and locomotives came from the Library of Congress.