The first contraption that ever produced synthetic music weighed a mere 7 tons. The second one already weighed 200 tons and it was so successful that a third one was built immediately afterwards weighing almost the same but having many more features.
In todays article on stories in HIFI History that deserve to be told we'll be talking about the fabulous Teleharmonium, or Dynamophone as it was also occasionally called.
The story really starts back in Napoleon's France, with philosopher and mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier who was thinking about diverse topics such as vibrations and heat transfer, making Napoleon successful in conquering Africa and the Greenhouse Effect that is currently driving global warming.
In his work on vibrations Fourier discovered something that was really quite remarkable and there are few technical objects today that are little more sophisticated than a kitchen blender, that aren’t designed in some way or another related to this surprising revelation.
What he found was that any repetitive waveform or signal at all can be described as the sum of a possibly infinite number of sine waves of increasing frequencies that are super imposed over each other. By performing what is known as a Fourier Transformation, we can therefore know what frequencies are present in a signal. Inversely, by performing an Inverse Fourier Transformation, we can also reproduce any signal by adding a sufficient amount of sine waves. Works like a charm and completely and entirely indispensible when designing loudspeakers that are intended to be any good.
Almost 70 years after Fourier’s death, a man named Thaddeus Cahill, a popular US inventor from Ohio knew about Fourier’s findings and must have been wondering what fun things he could do with them. And what a fun thing did he come up with... He may very well have been the first to be convinced that music can be produced with electricity and he went after his conviction with a vengeance.
The way he went about it was first ambitious and then outright outrageous:
The Teleharmonium Mark I already weighed 7 tons and used what are called tone wheels to generate the individual frequencies by moving a sinusoidal camshaft across a magnetic pickup which generates a sinusoidal signal with a frequency that corresponds to the speed of the wheel. Changing the distance of the individual pickups changed the amplitude of each frequency. The individual signals big and small were then fed together and turned into one. This signal would then be fed into an electromagnetic transducer that was invented not much earlier as part of the telephone wars. Cahill was noted for saying that electromagnetic diaphragms were the most preferable means of outputting his Teleharmonium’s distinctive sound, a statement we at KVART & BØLGE whole-heartedly agree with today. At the end of this monster was a rather large horn loudspeaker that directed the sound in the direction of the audience. This cabinet design was chosen for it’s great tonality and efficiency.
Due to the rather large electric motors and the accordingly large current that was induced, no mechanical amplification was necessary and it is reported that at the time, loudness was measured in horsepower and not Decibels.
With careful adjustment of the pick-ups, any waveform and thus any timbre or musical instrument could be reproduced reasonably accurately.
Hammond organs introduced much later in 1935 also used tone wheels, albeit they were a little more clever in their construction.
While The Teleharmonium used several individual motors all running at different speeds which corresponded to some fundamental frequency or multiples thereoff , Hammond organs used complicated gear mechanisms and one motor instead, to create the different frequencies contributing to the timbre of the desired musical instrument our synthetic sound desired. Hammond upheld this method of using tone wheels until 1970 when electronic means of signal generation replaced electro-mechanical ones.
As Mark I was proven to be a success, the madness had just begun. Mark II hit 39th and Broadway in 1906 in a specially built theater called the Harmonic Hall. Weighing in at an outright massive 200 tons the Mark II employed dozens of individual motors that were placed in an underground space as large as the entire auditorium itself. While few reports are available, public performances must have been successful enough, as soon enough Mark III was introduced at the same overall weight but with much improved control over the harmonics.
The Teleharmonium’s demise came for a number of reasons. Its immense size, weight and power caused obvious problems. The onset of “real” music recorded first on wax coated cylinders and then Shellacs brought a final blow to the behemoth concept when the introduction of so called Auxetophones, that used pressurized air as a form of amplification brought sound to sufficient levels for large theaters and concert halls at a fraction of the cost.
Also, by 1912, interest in this revolutionary instrument had diminished, and Cahill's company was declared unsuccessful in 1914. After Cahill died in 1934, his younger brother retained the much smaller Mark I for several decades, but was unable to interest anyone in it. This was the last version to be scrapped, in 1962. Who here is up for starting a Kick-Starter Campaign to reconstruct a full-blown Mark III?
Interestingly enough, Cahill not only invented the first synthetic musical instrument, he also envisioned and implemented the first streaming music service to go with it. His dream was to have hotels, theaters, music halls and private residences receive his Teleharmonium music on a pay per minute basis through the telephone system. Early attempts at Teleharmonium phone broadcasts were thwarted however, by the then common problem of “cross talk” during which people who were really interested in having a private conversation were suddenly interrupted by weird electronic music. At a price tag of $200,000 dollars at the time or what amounts to $5.5 million dollars today for the MARK III, I am sure he was entirely competitive compared to the cost of the server farms that companies like Spotify and Apple surly employ today. Not exactly the same selection of songs, but definitely a force to be reckoned with.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes audiophile quarter wave loudspeakers and sound systems at a price anyone can afford. In his free time he blogs about all things related to sound, music and audio.
