Welcome to Time Machines, where we offer up a selection of
mechanical oddities, milestone gadgets and unique inventions to test out your
tech-history skills.
This invention brought streaming music to New York City's
early adopters around the turn of the 20th century. Mark Twain, who was among
the first to have a personal telephone line installed, was an avid supporter of
the service, which provided the crystalline clarity of electrically generated
music delivered into his own home on the telephone wire. Head on past the break
to find out the full story.
The keyboard at Telharmonic Hall, New York City - circa 1907.
Thaddeus Cahill's
Telharmonium
The Telharmonium arrived nearly a century before services
like Pandora and SiriusXM began streaming music to homes and devices and almost
a decade before radio hit the airwaves all around the world. In March of 1876,
Alexander Graham Bell was granted his first telephone patent and in the decades
that followed, a web of phone lines spread exponentially across the globe,
reaching both businesses and households. Thaddeus Cahill saw opportunity in
those wires that went beyond just conversation. It was his grand vision to
create the perfect instrument, driven by electricity and capable of delivering
music from a "central station" to a multitude of destinations along
the growing network of telephone lines.
The Iowa-born inventor showed a spark of brilliance early
on, excelling at his lessons and tinkering with various devices in his early
teens. In 1891, at the age of 24, he headed to Washington, D.C., to work at his
brother's lab and over the next few years, music was on his mind. He conceived
of an electrical device that could mimic the tones of various instruments and
saw telephone receivers as a gateway to providing his new form of music to
anyone with a connection.
In 1897, Cahill received a patent for his "Art of and
Apparatus for Generating and Distributing Music Electrically," and soon
found investors for his "Telharmonium" project. With funding in hand
and a deal with a factory in the industrial city of Holyoke, Mass., Cahill
began construction of his dream. The Telharmonium's control center was an
unusually complex keyboard, enlisting at least 48 keys per octave, which would
trigger sounds devised to mimic the flute, clarinet, oboe and, most elusively,
the violin. Powering these electric tones were massive electrical generators;
all told, the weight of the machine was around 200 tons. In 1902, the machine
would test the abilities of the railway system as Cahill shipped the entire
device to its new home in New York City.
A section of the
switchboard and tone mixers in the basement of Telharmonic Hall, circa 1907.
The new location was called Telharmonic Hall and would offer
live performances of the instrument, which could be enjoyed in person and by
subscription at any of the various restaurants and hotels that had been swayed
by this unique device. The heart of the machine was located downstairs, with
rooms jam packed with alternators, tone mixers and switching systems. The tones
it generated were advertised as "The music of A.D. 2000," with a
technological purity and infinite timbres. Some reports were quite critical,
saying that staccatos sounded brittle and sharp, like a tiny steel hammer; lows
lacked fullness and the pitch tended to drift. Naysaying critics aside, the
Telharmonium's futuristic sound was a hit when it opened to the public in
January of 1907.
The backbone of Cahill's plan, however, was fulfilling
subscriptions and delivering his Telharmonic music to the masses, which proved
more difficult than he thought. Wiring subscribers was slowgoing and dealing
with the phone companies was a logistical, political and financial battle. It
seems the signals he was sending out on the phone lines tended to bleed into
phone conversations throughout the area, drawing frequent complaints. On top of
that, profit projections for the service, which hadn't been perfected, were
overestimated and failed to cover expenses.
Later, a short-lived financial crisis called the "Panic
of 1907," along with Nikola Tesla's announcements about the future of
radio and wireless, lead to the end of Telharmonic Hall and it was shipped back
to the factory in Holyoke. Undeterred, Cahill continued to develop his device.
He simplified the circuitry, scaled back the keyboard to a standard 12 keys per
octave (by utilizing multiple key banks), designed improved telephonic
receivers and increased the efficiency of his alternators so they could run at
higher speeds, producing up to 1.57 megawatts in output.
Cahill set up shop again in New York in 1911, but his second
attempt fared no better than the first. Wireless telegraphy stations had begun
to flourish. Radio had arrived, helped along by Lee de Forest's audion, a
vacuum tube that could vastly amplify signals and provide warm, pleasing tones.
It also marked a massive reduction in size for audio devices compared to the
Telharmonium. It seems Cahill's innovation arrived a few years too soon to take
advantage of the vacuum tube's cost- and space-saving technology, but also too
late to enjoy a prolonged success before radio's ubiquity.
[Image credits: New York Electric Music Co., Telharmonic
Hall Program]
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