   From GHN  Revision as of 14:11, 15 September 2008 by Nbrewer
(Talk | contribs) Jump to: navigation, search   “Telharmonium”
was the strange-sounding name given to one of the earliest
electrical musical instruments by its inventor, whose Thaddeus
Cahill. The Iowa-born Cahill was a lawyer and sometime inventor,
born in 1867. As a youth he enjoyed experimenting with
telephones and other gadgets.  A duo at the Washington
Telharmonium keyboard from the magazine World's Work, June 1906.
By the 1890s, Cahill was fascinated by the prospect of creating
a new kind of musical instrument, one that would surpass what he
saw as the limitations of all existing types, such as the
limited range of notes they could play. In the early 1890s he
developed the idea of using small alternating-current generators
to generate electric waves at various frequencies. These would
be controlled by a keyboard and heard through a telephone
receiver. The final design, patented in 1897, had twelve
separate generators, which produced the tw