Edison Talking Doll

Thomas Edison himself joined the ranks of doll manufacturers in 1890 when he introduced his Singing Doll. He fitted a bisque head on a metal torso and placed inside it a teeny Edison phonograph with a wax cylinder and a recording of a nursery rhyme. The Edison Toy Phonograph Manufacturing Company produced about ten thousand dolls, twenty-five hundred of which passed quality control and were released for sale. Within a month, though, disgruntled customers started returning most of the dolls to the factory. The steel stylus tore up the wax cylinder, and the mechanism, which required a delicate hand turning the crank to operate, was beyond the ability of a child's hand. But even Edison, later, voiced what was perhaps the real problem with the doll: "The voices of the little monsters were exceedingly unpleasant to hear."