Hope everyone had a nice Christmas – we certainly did. Emily got an Elsa doll and of course it has batteries. It needs the batteries to talk and sing. If you think too many toys require batteries these days, you might just as well “let it go.”
I remember when most dolls didn’t “do” anything — they were just dolls. I suppose girls just pretended they were little people. The first talking doll that I remember seeing was one that Kelly had that spoke Spanish. You’d pull the pacifier out of her mouth and she’d talk. The doll had a miniature tape playback machine embedded in her body. I know, because Kelly must have taken that doll apart at least 100 times (it wasn’t made to come apart.) Turns out she was more interested in how it worked than the doll itself.
Dolls over the years have become more and more realistic and, of course, if they can talk, they’re even more realistic. The first dolls that “talked” invariably said “mama.” Most, if not all them used a bellows or some kind of weighted mechanism to create the sound of “mama.” These mama sounds weren’t anywhere close to sounding like a human voice. The advances in electronics now make it possible to create realistic sounds, including the human voice in a very small, low power package, but it’s been a long road to get to this point for dollmakers.
Most of the early talking dolls were produced using some form of a phonograph mechanism and as we all know, the phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison. He’s noted for inventing, or making significant contributions to, many great inventions. However, not many people know that he invented the “must-have” Christmas toy in 1890 — a talking doll. Edison never wanted his phonograph to be used for frivolous purposes, like music. But for some reason, he was receptive to using it for children’s toys. In 1887 Edison formed a new company called the Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company. His business partners came up with the idea of putting the phonograph into a doll, and Edison licensed the idea from them and lent his name to the new toy. Edison’s Talking Doll used a small version of his hand-cranked phonograph to recite a nursery rhyme. When news of this doll leaked out, many people placed orders before any dolls were produced. Apparently the company employed an “army” of girls to record the voices of the dolls — each doll had a unique recorded voice because there was no way to reproduce the recording without doing each one individually. It turns out that all the dolls worked just fine in the factory, but the phonographs were extremely delicate and almost all of them were damaged in shipping. By the time they reached the customers and appeared under the Christmas trees, just about every doll’s “voice” sounded like a shrill, garbled mess. But the toy had been hyped so much it didn’t make much difference whether it worked or not. It was one of those “must-have” gifts that (spoiled?) little rugrats just needed/wanted.
So even back in 1890, kids wanted the latest and greatest. If you run out of batteries keeping all the toys going this year, I’m thinking Thomas Edison may be to blame….
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