国立アメリカ歴史博物館さんのインスタグラム写真 - (国立アメリカ歴史博物館Instagram)「Struggling to find the "must have" toy of this holiday season? Us too. But let's take a moment to appreciate the misfit toys that don't find a home—like Thomas Edison's 1890 talking dolls. When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, he imagined the new device being used to do more than preserve dictation. Animating toys was one of his ideas. Edison's idea became a reality in the 1880s, when his company licensed another to make and sell talking dolls as the Edison Toy Phonograph Company. The toy that the company produced was revolutionary. The 22-inch doll came with a ceramic head , wooden limbs, and a torso that contained a tiny phonograph with a brown wax record. When someone turned a crank inserted into the back of the torso, the phonograph would play a nursery rhyme like "Jack and Jill." (Important note: although the doll in our collection has a bald head, the original dolls would have had hair and clothes). Although Edison's dolls received some favorable press coverage when then debuted in the spring of 1890, they quickly failed in the market. The toys had problems—many of them, in fact. The dolls were expensive, broke easily, and the sound fidelity of the nursery rhyme recordings left a lot to be desired. (Due to the limitations of the technology, every record needed to be created individually. Edison hired teenaged girls to make the recordings, who had to shout the rhyme so it could be picked up by the machine. The resulting recordings were pretty "screechy," in our curator's assessment). By the summer of 1890, the company had pulled the dolls from stores. The newest episode of the @Smithsonian’s @sidedoorpod begins with a short story imagining what would happen if two children received one of Edison's talking dolls as a holiday gift, then dives into the history of the dolls with our curator Carlene Stephens. Use the link in our bio to download the episode: http://s.si.edu/3mwYeF2 #History #AmericanHistory #BusinessHistory #WomensHistory #TechnologyHistory #TechHistory #ToyHistory #HolidayShopping #HolidayToys #Edison #Phonograph #Girlhood #BecauseOfHerStory」12月17日 6時31分