Thomas Edison’s talking doll terrified the children of 1890 so much that it was discontinued after only six weeks. Each 22-inch doll had a tiny, fragile wax cylinder record player hidden inside its metal chest. The ghostly voices in the recordings were of women shouting nursery rhymes like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into recording horns at Edison’s factory, which resulted in high-pitched, scratchy, and distorted audio playback.
Children had to turn a hand crank on the back to make the doll speak, but the wax cylinders warped easily and cracked, creating eerie sounds that Edison himself later called “little monsters”
Read Full Article: https://www.independentsentinel.com/the-scary-toy-that-terrified-children-in-1890/
