Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Doll: A Forgotten Flop from the Wizard of Menlo Park

Everyone knows Thomas Edison, the prolific inventor behind the phonograph and the electric light bulb, but what you might not know is that he also had a knack for ideas that never quite took off. Across his lifetime, Edison held more than 2,300 patents worldwide. While some changed the course of history, others quietly disappeared, lost to time or doomed from the start. One such misstep was the eerie and ill-fated Edison Talking Doll.

Embedded in each doll's tin torso was a miniaturized model of Thomas Edison's phonograph, its conical horn trained toward a series of perforations in the doll's chest.

After unveiling the phonograph in 1877, a groundbreaking device that could record and play back sound, Edison began experimenting with the idea of bringing toys to life with recorded voices. By 1888, he had produced prototypes of a doll with a built-in phonograph. The idea was novel: children’s toys that could actually speak. By 1890, Edison’s company was ready to sell them.

The dolls were sizeable at 22 inches tall and made mostly of metal, which gave them a cold, rigid feel. Inside each one was a miniature phonograph and a horn directed through tiny holes in the doll’s chest. A small crank at the back brought the doll to life — or something like it — reciting nursery rhymes in a voice that many found downright unsettling.

Originally, the dolls used tin cylinders to store the audio, but somewhere along the line, this was switched to wax — a change Edison’s team never publicly explained, but one that would prove disastrous. The wax was far less durable, and it degraded quickly after just a few uses. Many recordings were nearly unintelligible by the time the dolls reached customers. Even Edison himself was horrified, once remarking, “The voices of the little monsters were exceedingly unpleasant to hear.”

Each doll’s recording had to be done manually, one by one, there was no mass-production method for sound recordings in 1890. That meant no two dolls sounded quite the same, which is fascinating today but was a logistical nightmare at the time. Combine that with the price, around two weeks’ wages for the basic version, and even more for the dressed-up models, and you’ve got a recipe for consumer disaster.

When the dolls hit shelves in New York on April 7, 1890, expectations were high. But the excitement quickly fizzled. Few worked properly, many arrived damaged, and the crank mechanism was finicky at best. Complaints poured in. Within weeks, Edison halted production. Fewer than 500 dolls were sold — most of which were promptly returned by disappointed and sometimes frightened parents.

By May, the project was scrapped altogether.

Today, Edison’s Talking Dolls are rare collector’s items and museum curiosities. Only a handful survive in playable condition, and those that do reveal the crackling, ghostly voice of a bygone experiment in early sound technology. If you ever hear one — and you can, thanks to digital preservation — it’s equal parts fascinating and unsettling.

As for Edison? He moved on to his next big thing. But the failure of the talking doll serves as a quirky reminder that even history’s greatest inventors had their off days.

Play the video below to hear the doll pictured above sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (best not to do it before going to bed).

---