I Am Always Amazed About,

how items we take as granted today started out, 

take the concept of music for the masses as an example, back in 1893 an inventor from Washington, D.C. named Thaddeus Cahill was experimenting with telephone transmissions when he had a novel idea: He noticed that when an electric generator, or dynamo, sent current down a phone line, it created a tone in the earpiece, and different frequencies of current created different tones, Cahill quickly realised that if he had 12 dynamos -each corresponding to a note on the scale- he could send music over phone lines, He spent the next four years perfecting the idea, and in 1897 received a patent for the telharmonium, not only the world’s first significant electric musical instrument -but the first one that could be potentially heard by thousands of people at once,

this was great news, at the time if you wanted to listen to live music you had to be within hearing distance of the person playing the instrument, the phonograph was becoming popular -but that was recorded music, and the popularity of the radio was decades away, the instrument was basically a giant electric organ, it had two keyboards -one on top of the other- and hundreds of wires running to generators, transformers, and various other electrical parts that sent current down the line, and to magnify the sound, he called for large paper cones that could be fixed to the earpieces of telephones (the precursor to the loudspeaker),

when the telharmonium was turned on, an electric motor turned turned the shafts of the 12 dynamos, known as 'tone shafts.' each dynamo had a four-foot-long metal shaft packed with metal disks pictured above, the disks, or 'tone wheels,'  had different numbers of differently-sized teeth on their edges, as they rotated past the coil, the teeth would produce varying frequencies of electricity, which would, in turn, produce different notes.


but there were many problems with the newfangled instrument, and these would soon prove to be insurmountable, the most obvious one was cost, Cahill built a third telharmonium in 1911, for an unbelievable $200,000 (the equivalent of $4 million today) and his investors were unhappy with the rate of return, 

the telharmonium played its last concert in 1916, there are no known surviving models of the device and no recordings are known to exist, but Cahill has ushered in the era of electronically produced music, and the world would never be the same, decades later, a former watchmaker took Cahill’s design, miniaturised it with the help of new technology, and came up with his own electronic organ, complete with tone wheels, draw stops, and foot pedals for shaping sounds, the Hammond organ, invented in 1935 by Laurens Hammond, would become an American classic.