Making Creator Headlines · Page 10
Edison’s Talking Doll Gets Another Hearing
· New York time
NPR is revisiting Thomas Edison’s talking doll, a product now considered among his biggest failures. The retrospective accompanies the history of October 21 as Edison Day, once marked by American parades celebrating the inventor. His phonograph, the first device to play back a recorded human voice, made the doll possible. The cultural lesson is not that recording technology lacked value. It is that a significant invention can produce a deeply unappealing application. Long before today’s smart devices, American innovation had already explored the question: what if this household object spoke, and nobody enjoyed it?
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