From the wonderful edisontinfoil.com -- the doll, and the hand-cranked player inside her. |
Talking doll
cylinders
The Edison Phonograph
Toy Manufacturing Company
November 1888
Nightmare time!
As discussed in the last NRR Project entry, Thomas Edison
was all about finding a profitable use to which to put his inventions. Here’s
one of the terrifying consequences of that impetus – the Edison Talking Doll.
For decades, clever arrangements of bladders and reeds in
doll bodies had created the culturally familiar talking doll – one that
exclaimed “mama” and flipped open its eyes when stood. Edison dreamed of dolls
speaking with children’s voices, even telling stories to them, and animal toys
with real barks and whistles.
Here’s how the Edison
Talking Doll worked. A small tin or wax cylinder capable of 12 to 15 seconds of
recorded sound was housed in the torso of a child’s doll. Hand-turning the
playback crank would play the recording of a nursery rhyme. The eight surviving
recordings feature “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” “Hickory dickory dock,”
Jack and Jill,” “Little Jack Horner,” “There was a little girl,” and “Now I lay
me down to sleep.” The National Park Service is the ne plus ultra for info on this, including recordings.
The recordings were individually, by young women using children’s
voices. The effect is past unnverving – plaintive, scratchy voices like the
kind you hear in the horror film right before the doll stabs you. Given our
uneasy associations with dummies, automata, mannequins and the like, it’s not
surprising these dolls were not as appealing as they were conceived to be.
Other problems – the hand crank meant that the playback was
uneven and warped if not turned careful, the cylinder wore out quickly, and
they couldn’t be switched out, either. Most reviews of the day classified the
playback as unintelligible. Patrick
Feaster’s masterfully thorough essay on the subject can be found here.
It’s useful to consider this dead end. Edison was constantly
throwing off ideas, like sparks off a flywheel. His laboratory was an immense
research and development complex. The persistent inventor and entrepreneur
wasn’t afraid to spend some money to test a product’s viability. Decades before
Teddy Ruxpin came long, Edison abandoned the project, buried the recordings in
a field, and sold the dolls. Scant few remain to tell the story.
The National Recording
Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in
the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: ‘Fifth
Regiment March’ and ‘The Pattison
Waltz.’
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