Streaming live music may seem like a very recent invention, but it actually dates back over 100 years! In 1897, inventor Thaddeus Cahill, a resident of Washington DC, invented and patented a machine which could deliver live music through telephones into homes, and through specially designed hanging lamps for public locations such as hotels, restaurants, barbershops, etc. Cahill named his invention the Telharmonium.
Through an annual subscription, people could pick up their telephone and ask the operator to connect them to the Telharmonium. Once connected, they could hear classical pieces and popular tunes of the day over their phone by attaching a large paper funnel to the receiver. The funnel was especially designed for Telharmonium service in order to amplify the music, much like the horn of a phonograph works.
The Telharmonium made its debut in New York City in 1906. Keyboard players, often two at a time, were hired in shifts to play music together on one large dual keyboard, 24 hours a day, from a building named Telharmonic Hall. While keyboard players produced music for Telharmonium customers at home, others would occasionally visit Telharmonic Hall to hear the music in person, a sort of concert if you will, the music emanating from specially designed carbon lamps hanging from the ceiling since no sound came from the keyboard itself. On another floor of the building was 200 tons of machinery required to generate the tunes over telephone lines.
The keyboard was attached to rotors and generators by wires. Each key, when pressed, played upon electric currents which led to switchboards and tone transformers, generating tones over the telephone which were advertised to clearly resemble those of a flute, fife, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone, cornet, french horn, tuba, snare drum, and violin. However, subscribers claimed all they heard was an organ consisting of high-pitched tones.
The Telharmonium was a popular form of entertainment over the next few years, and was covered in a number of publications. In 1907, the popular publication, McClure’s, noted, “It is the dream of the inventor that, in the future, we may be awakened by appropriate music in the morning and go to bed at night with lullabies.” If this idea had come to fruition, it would have been the first form of the radio alarm clock.
Unfortunately, the Telharmonium was to be short-lived. As more people began having telephones installed in their homes, it was common for lines to get crossed. People often picked up their telephones only to hear someone’s conversation in progress or to be interrupted by another’s conversation, and this was also true of the Telharmonium line. Many times, the Telharmonium line would get crossed with other lines and a conversation would be disrupted by music, whether those disrupted individuals were subscribers to the music service or not. This happened so often, and so many complaints were filed with the phone company, AT&T, that AT&T had no choice but to terminate their contract with Thaddeus Cahill and his Telharmonium service in 1912. Cahill attempted to keep his invention and service going by installing his own telephone lines, but it didn’t pan out and the Telharmonium was nothing more than a memory by 1916. No recordings of the Telharmonium exist.
Such was once the case against recorded music, the man most strongly against it being a musician himself, famed composer and conductor John Philip Sousa, best known for his American military marches.
With the rising popularity of the phonograph in the early 1900s, Sousa felt this machine cheapened the art of music. Prior to the days of the phonograph, those who wanted to hear music either had to learn to play it themselves or attend a performance. Sousa felt that the ease of bringing recorded music into the home would eventually lead to the decline of amateur musicians, who would neglect honing their musical skills in place of simply playing a record.
“When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabies, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs – without soul or expression?”
The phonograph only continued increasing in popularity, with Sousa’s marches among some of the most popular recorded music of the time.
Cake Walk footage filmed in 1903, from the play “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”.
On May 29, 1912, fifteen women employed by Curtis Publishing in Philadelphia were fired for dancing the Turkey Trot on their lunch break. The turkey Trot, a popular dance among youth beginning around 1910, was a couples dance involving quick steps and movement of the upper body, particularly the raising and lowering of the elbows which was said to imitate the flapping wings of an excited turkey, hence the name of the dance. The Turkey Trot was often performed to ragtime music, considered by many Americans to be music mostly performed and enjoyed by lower classes. Ragtime was not up to standard to the more elegant sophisticated music Americans had come to know over the previous twenty years.
The Turkey Trot was banned in multiple cities and even warned against by doctors as being dangerous to perform. Doctors claimed many patients were coming in to see them with foot pain, the ailment being called “Turkey Trot Instep”. A number of newspapers falsely reported that dancers suddenly dropped dead after performing the Turkey Trot. This story may have been concocted by one newspaper in an attempt to scare people into stop performing the dance, but was mistakenly picked up and reported by other papers as fact.
The man who fired the fifteen women, Edward Bok, was the powerful editor of the monthly publication The Ladies’ Home Journal. Bok had walked in on the women practicing the dance, resulting in them being fired. He considered the dance disgraceful and lacking class. Bok’s actions made headlines across the country, making him one of the most disliked men in America in 1912.
A Missouri newspaper joked about Bok walking in on the women dancing, stating, “Mr. Bok was so greatly shocked that his maid had to administer smelling salts and fan him several hours.”
In 1913, President-elect Woodrow Wilson stated he did not want the White House holding an inaugural ball in his honor. The New York Times reported that he feared there would be an indulgence in the Turkey Trot which could potentially lead to a national scandal. The Washington Post also covered this story with the headline “Fear of ‘Turkey Trot’ Kills Inaugural Ball”, the story being picked up and reported by papers throughout the country, as seen by the headline below from a newspaper in Santa Rosa, California.
The Turkey Trot, along with other dances named after animals which were performed with “inappropriate” actions, such as the Grizzly Bear and Bunny Hug, remained controversial dances through the mid-1910s until the beginning of World War I, when the dance slipped from peoples’ minds in place of more important worldly matters which would soon involve the United States.
