A closer look
Thomas Edison manufactured a line of talking dolls in 1890 that were complete commercial failures because they sounded like literal demons; eager to capitalize on his recently invented phonograph, the famous inventor shoved tiny metal audio cylinders into the wooden chests of children's toys to make them recite popular nursery rhymes, but the primitive recording technology required adult women to scream the poems directly into a crude microphone, resulting in playback audio that resembled the terrifying shrieks of a haunted ghost, and combined with the extremely heavy metal mechanism inside the torso that required kids to violently crank a handle on the doll's back, the creepy mechanical monstrosity was incredibly tedious to operate, causing horrified parents to return them in droves and ultimately forcing the wizard of Menlo Park to quietly abandon his terrifying foray into the lucrative nightmare-fuel industry
