Edison's Greatest Failure

This doll was built by Thomas Edison and I promise you you are not ready for what it sounds like. It was on sale for 6 weeks in 1890 before Edison pulled it off the shelves. Kids were terrified of it. It was the first doll ever sold with a phonograph inside of it and it sounds

like this because in 1890 nobody could mass-produce a recording. Every single doll had to be recorded by hand one at a time. Edison hired young women to sit in his New Jersey factory and shout nursery rhymes into a horn all day long over and over again. The wax barely picked them up even then. So [music] Edison used

rhymes every kid already knew because otherwise you couldn't make out a word. Historians think they were the first people ever paid to make recordings. The first recording artists in history weren't singers, they were factory workers yelling Twinkle Twinkle Little Star into a horn. When the dolls went on sale one newspaper said they'd be a lot

more entertaining if you could understand what they were saying. Kids couldn't work the crank [music] and the wax wore out. The few records that survived spent over a century in silence because a needle could destroy the only copy. Then scientists scanned the grooves with light and rebuilt the sound without ever touching them. This one is

a woman in 1890 doing her best impression of a little girl saying her bedtime prayer. It is the single most upsetting thing I have ever heard come out of a toy. We don't know her name. We don't know if she ever heard herself played back but more than 130 years later she's still doing the job she was

hired for. >> Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.