The Artifact: Edison's Creepy Phonograph Doll

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

0:10Speaker 2:Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Artifact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. Who doesn't love a good creepy talking doll? Our horror films and TV shows are, of course, full with them. From talky Tina in the Twilight Zone episode Living Doll back in 63, Chucky in 1988's Child's Play, to more recent high-tech terror such as Megan and its sequel. Even the old Twilight Zone episode that was based on an actual Mattel talking doll, Chatty Cathy, which debuted in 1959. But all of this has a creepy and much earlier predecessor in the form of Thomas Edison's singing phonograph doll. Yes, long before Teddy Ruxpin or any of the AI horrors that we have today.

1:04Speaker 2:Back in 1889, American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison produced a toy that certainly looked like your standard-issue doll. Like, not quite a baby doll, but like a young girl doll. However, beneath its gown, the doll's torso was a metal chassis with slits in it. And inside of this chassis, you had a simple phonograph device that allowed it to, quote-unquote, sing... Mary Had a Little Lamb, or another nursery rhyme, depending on what had been pre-recorded and loaded into the doll.

1:36Speaker 2:As discussed on the website of the Henry Ford Museum, only a hundred or so of the dolls were ever made. The mechanism proved too unreliable, and the singing voice a bit garbled, a bit creepy even, kind of a droning that a lot of sources indicate creeped children out. Now, here's the thing. Looking back on childlike whimsy from prior ages, it's easy for us to judge them as frightening. People are always going on about creepy clowns, but come on, clowns of old were a delight by and large. We often misinterpret them or we reinterpret them through the lens of our modern horror sensibilities. However, it really does seem the case that Edison's dollies gave at least some people the willies, as we'll get into. But on the other hand, it might have been overblown to a certain extent as well.

2:27Speaker 2:So as Patrick Feaster points out, in a cultural history of the Edison talking doll record for Thomas Edison National Historical Park, talking dolls, of course, had been around for decades at this point. But they were dependent on things like reeds and bellows. They were very limited in what they could say. So mostly you had baby dolls that could say mama or papa, that sort of thing. They certainly couldn't sing an entire song. Phonograph technology, Edison figured, would enable dolls to say a whole lot more, and he figured there would be a market for this. Obviously, there ultimately would be a market for this, but the first technology to tackle a problem like this is going to run into some problems. The sounds could be recorded and then replayed inside the doll, and Feaster goes into great detail about the steps Edison and his team made, overcoming technological details, miniaturization of the technology, making it durable enough to hold up to the sort of play that children were going to inflict on these dolls, as well as some legal hurdles to actually produce the dolls as well, getting into patents and so forth. However, he merely mentions

3:37Speaker 2:that the public generally found the dolls unintelligible rather than creepy. And the ultimate failure of the dolls seems to have mostly been due to the high price tag. It would have been the equivalent of $ 200 today. And according to NPR's Nita Ulabi reporting in 2015, You know, that was very much the case. Sources indicate that Thomas Edison later himself referred to the dolls after their failure as, quote unquote, little monsters. So, you know, there's a little bit of room here to interpret this as a view that the dolls were on some level creepy. But again, it seems like most of the emphasis is going to be on high price tag, the unintelligible quality of what they were singing.

4:19Speaker 2:They just sounded garbled. It was kind of a droning. And at the same time, yeah, I can imagine this kind of creeping out some kids. I don't think that's too much of a stretch. Feaster writes that Edison eventually had all of the phonographs removed from the little monsters that had not been sold and, according to legend, possibly buried, while the dolls themselves were then sold mute to children who presumably were perfectly capable of supplying voices for the dolls themselves. Isn't that always the case? We turn to some sort of technological adaptation that's going to enable a toy to talk. But children have never had a problem getting a toy to talk. Children have never had a problem getting a toy to move. I mean, that's how play works. Not to say that some of these technological advancements haven't made for some fun toys, but at the end of the day, I mean, imagination is the driving force.

5:12Speaker 2:But here's one last little bit of horror flavoring for you. Imagine those little voice boxes, those little phonographs. buried somewhere secretly, perhaps still whispering, pleading for the day when they might be reunited with their little antique bodies. Tune in for additional episodes of The Artifact, The Monster Fact, or Animalia Stupendium each week.

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