The Tango Two: Magnetic Dancers on the Gramophone

摘要

When on the 18th July 1877 Thomas A. Edison carefully enunciated the words of the popular nursery rhyme, 'Mary had a little Lamb' into the mouthpiece of his new invention, the 'phonograph', he also had unwittingly started a new range of toys, which became known as 'phonograph toys', shortened to 'phonotoys'. Edison intended his phonograph for scientific, business and educational purposes, but seeing their market potential he allowed his name to be used by William W. Jacques and Lowell Briggs to establish the Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company which began manufacturing talking dolls in 1887. Remarkably, the first commercial recordings to be made available to the public were children's nursery rhymes sold with a $10.00 doll. Edison's first phonographs had their recordings on wax cylinders. It was a small version of such a cylinder in his talking doll, but it was the advent of the domestic phonograph operated by the spinning motion of the shellac disc record that introduced the first flurry of phonograph toys between 1909 and 1925. Our 'Tango Two' is a direct descendant of the magnetic toys devised during the Enlightenment to demonstrate the mysterious force of magnetism.