Telharmonium
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Through Alternating current, Electronics and Electromagnetism
Like the later Hammond organ, the Telharmonium used tonewheels to generate musical sounds as electrical signals by additive synthesis. It is considered to be the first electromechanical musical instrument.
Background
- 1809, Prussian Samuel Thomas Soemmerring created an electrical telegraph that triggered an array of tuned bells
- In 1885, Hermann Helmholtz’s ‘On the Sensations of Tone’ (1862) appeared in English
- Elisha Gray’s ‘Musical Telegraph’ of 1874
- In Paris, Clément Ader created the ‘Théâtrophone’ in 1881 using two lines to pass music from a local theater to two separate phone receivers, dubbed "binauriclar auduition", the first "stereo" concert via telephone.
- In 1890 AT&T ceased work on a service to provide music, admitting difficulty with sound quality.
- In 1893 Hungarian Tivadar Puskás created the ‘Telefonhírmondó’ or ‘Telephone Herald’
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History
In 1890's, Thaddeus Cahill was a lawyer living in Washington DC who invented devices for Pianos and Typewriters.
- "Cahill was working as a Congressional aide when he conceived the idea"
The final design, patented in 1897, had twelve separate alternating-current generators, to generate electric waves, to produce the twelve basic tones of the musical scale, that would be controlled by a keyboard and heard through a telephone receiver.
Cahill built three versions. Each was an advancement over the features of its predecessor.
By 1901, Cahill had constructed a working model, to seek financial backing for a finished machine. The Mark I weighed 7 tons.
The 1906 model, had 145 separate electric generators. The Mark II weighed almost 200 tons, was 60 feet long, had multiple keyboards and controls, and required at least two players.
- "As early as 1906, the Cahill Telharmonium Company of New York attempted to sell musical entertainment (produced by Dr. Thaddeus Cahill's "Telharmonium," an early synthesizer) to subscribers through the telephone. The Bell Telephone company, claiming that company equipment might be damaged, refused to give the company permission to use its lines, and the firm switched to radio technology"
- "Dr. Lee DeForest, of wireless telegraphy fame, made a series of successful tests with Telharmonic music currents, making the selection of the concert at Telharmonic hall clearly audible to hearers miles away without wires." — Passaic Daily News, Passaic, New Jersey, 16 March 1907, Page 6
The 1911, last Telharmonium, the Mark III, weighed almost 200 tons, was 60 feet long, had multiple keyboards and controls, and required at least two players, was installed in a special performance room in New York City.
A small number of performances were given for live audiences, in addition to the telephone transmissions. Performances in New York City (some at "Telharmonic Hall", 39th and Broadway) were well received by the public in 1906, with Mark Twain among the appreciative audience. In these presentations, the performer sat at a console to control the instrument. The actual mechanism was so large it occupied an entire room; wires from the controlling console were fed discreetly through holes in the auditorium floor, into the instrument room below.
The Telharmonium foreshadowed modern electronic musical equipment in a number of ways. For instance, its sound output came in the form of connecting ordinary telephone receivers to large paper cones—a primitive form of loudspeaker. Cahill stated that electromagnetic diaphragms were the most preferable means of outputting its distinctive sound. There are no known recordings of its music.
The Telharmonium was retailed by Cahill for $200,000.
The Telharmonium's demise came for a number of reasons. The instrument was immense in size and weight. This being an age before vacuum tubes had been invented, it required large electric dynamos which consumed great amounts of power in order to generate sufficiently strong audio signals. In addition, problems began to arise when telephone broadcasts of Telharmonium music were subject to crosstalk and unsuspecting telephone users would be interrupted by strange electronic music. By 1912, interest in this revolutionary instrument had changed, and Cahill's company was declared not successful in 1914.
Cahill died in 1934; his younger brother retained the Mark I for decades, but was unable to interest anyone in it. This was the last version to be scrapped, in 1962.
Design
- "The telharmonium generated its sounds using a system of alternators called "rheotomes." Each rheotome was actually a cog with a specific number of notched teeth. As the edge of the rheotome rotated against a wire brush (part of a larger circuit), the teeth would contact the brush a certain number of times each second, based on the rheotome's diameter. This resulted in the electrical oscillation of a sonic frequency."
Telharmonium tones were described as "clear and pure" — referring to the electronic sine wave tones it was capable of producing. However, it was not restricted to such simple sounds. Each tonewheel of the instrument corresponded to a single note, and, to broaden its possibilities, Cahill added several extra tonewheels to add harmonics to each note. This, combined with organ-like stops and multiple keyboards (the Telharmonium was polyphonic), as well as a number of foot pedals, meant that every sound could be sculpted and reshaped — the instrument was noted for its ability to reproduce the sounds of common orchestral woodwind instruments such as the flute, bassoon, clarinet, and also the cello. The Telharmonium needed 671 kilowatts of power:233 and had 153 keys that allowed it to work properly.
Legacy
- "Ferruccio Busoni was inspired by the machine at the height of its popularity and moved to write his ‘Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music’ (1907) which in turn became the clarion call and inspiration for the new generation of electronic composers such as Edgard Varèse and Luigi Russolo."