ABSTRACT
The prospect of a talking doll was made possible by Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877. By 1890 Edison had built a factory to manufacture talking dolls that encased a miniaturized version of the phonograph so that the dolls appeared to sing nursery rhymes. Although large numbers were produced, the doll was not successful. It was very expensive; the voice mechanism wore out prematurely; and, like the more recent My Real Baby and My Dream Baby mentioned later, the dolls were too heavy. The ambition to create a talking doll dates back at least as far as the 18th century, when mechanical toys and automata were popular as part of a quest for artificial life (Standage, 2002; Wood, 2002). Other talking dolls, such as Dolly Rekord, were developed during the early part of the 20th century, but the mechanical recordings on which they relied were not robust, and it was not until electronic voice synthesis became possible that they became more reliable. In the interim, Mattel produced Chatty Cathy in the 1960s, operated by pulling a cord in the doll’s back to make it talk, and Worlds of Wonder produced a talking teddy bear, Teddy Ruxpin, in 1985.
