Telharmonium Documentary

Magic Music has a documentary on the Telharmonium. It's broken into three 10 min quicktime movies.

You can watch PART 1 - PART 2 - PART 3

The Telharmonium designed by Thadeus Cahill in 1897 was the first electronic synth. It was a huge thing. It weighed 200 tonnes and was 60ft long. The funny thing is it was marketed as being mobile. You could put it on 36 train carriages and move it from city to city :)

It was a very forward thinking instrument that transmitted its electronically generated tones over phone lines. The hope was to set up a subscription service. A kind of steampunk version of i-tunes. Also amazingly enough it incorporated a microtonal keyboard that had 36 notes per octave as opposed to the normal 12. It was such a marvel they even give it it's own hall the "Telharmonic Hall" on 39th Street and Broadway New York City.

Of course like all radical inventions it had problems. Firstly it predated amplifiers by about 20 years. Secondly the phone lines weren't really cut out for it and suffered pretty bad crosstalk. So people having a chat could hear the Telharmonium playing away. Lastly the power needed to run such a massive synth was such that it was verging on being a very unsafe place to work. It's always good to see yesterdays future :)

sent my way thanks to "noise hacker"