SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Today was once celebrated around the country as Edison Day, the anniversary of the successful testing of the incandescent light bulb by inventor Thomas Edison and his team. Edison invented a lot of things, including a device that could play a recording of the human voice - the phonograph. Though it should be noted, that led to a product now considered one of Edison's greatest failures, or at least one of his creepiest. It's also an invention that pairs well with the Halloween season Edison Day falls toward. NPR's Jennifer Vanasco reports.
JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: Thomas Edison and his workshop invented the phonograph in 1877.
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THOMAS EDISON: Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow.
VANASCO: But he's a businessman. He wants to sell things. What's he going to do with a machine that plays recorded sound?
HAL WALLACE: Edison realizes that his original phonograph, they didn't make that many of them.
VANASCO: Hal Wallace is a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
WALLACE: They had fidelity issues, reliability issues.
VANASCO: One of Edison's colleagues, though, had two young daughters, and he said...
WALLACE: Well, there may be a market, you know, for a doll.
VANASCO: The dolls came to toy stores in 1890, but they were about 2 feet high and heavy, about 4 pounds. The dolls were also expensive. Edison called them his little monsters. They had porcelain heads with large, staring eyes, wooden articulated limbs. They're unnerving.
WALLACE: Yeah, I don't know if it's a, you know, ancestor of Chucky or not, but (laughter) maybe.
VANASCO: And in the center of their hard metal chests, a tiny phonograph with a little gramophone-like horn playing thin wax cylinders. They sounded like this.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (As doll) Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.
VANASCO: That is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Every single doll's voice was recorded individually by women sitting in cubicles in Edison's factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The wax cylinders that the voices are recorded on, they warped after only a few plays, until you couldn't understand what they were saying. This is "Jack And Jill." It's unintelligible.
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WALLACE: The mechanisms were so sensitive. And we're talking about children here (laughter). They're going to play with the toy.
VANASCO: Within a month, the project was over. The dolls were taken off the shelves. Newspapers around the country agreed they were a complete failure. But Edison himself continued to be a success. His biggest contribution, it wasn't a single invention. He created things like the first electrical grid and the research laboratory.
WALLACE: Things like Bell Telephone Laboratory (ph) and Watson Research Center for IBM, I mean, these all, in a sense, follow that model.
VANASCO: But inventions were what he was famous for. And so, National Edison Day included parades, special events until they trailed off in the 1950s. At that point, electric lights, phonographs, motion pictures, these inventions were no longer wondrous novelties. They were part of our everyday lives. But those creepy dolls, those are still fascinating.
Jennifer Vanasco, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE DARE SONG, "GIRLS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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