The Economic Times

Thomas Edison's talking dolls in 1890 became nightmare fuel due to creepy voice recordings. Its eerie sound earned it the name little monsters

Thomas Edisons talking dolls were designed to delight children with recorded nursery rhymes, but their strange voices made the toys far less appealing than he had hoped. Launched in 1890, the dolls hid miniature phonographs inside their bodies, marking an unusual milestone in the history of recorded sound. However, distorted recordings, fragile mechanisms and an unexpectedly poor reception soon turned the ambitious invention into a big failure.