THE TELHARMONIUM AND THE PROPHETIC VISIONS OF THADDEUS CAHILL

One late night in April,1934, in a residence at 316 West 84th St in New York City – a building which no longer exists – a man in his mid-60’s typed up an 18 page manuscript whose deep sadness still can be sensed as it’s read decades later. At the top of the first page, he wrote “To be read when alone and unhurried.”  In this document, the  writer, an inventor named George Cahill known for developing the floodlight projectors which first provided light for night games at Yankee Stadium, Madison Garden, England’s Wembley Stadium and many other venues, famous and no-so famous, poured out his grief over the death of his brother, Thaddeus,  who had died suddenly in the same apartment several days before, on April 12, 1934.  Only moments before, George wrote, his brother had been in his “usual good health and cheerful spirits,” and then he “passed away without any warning.”  The doctor who had examined him, determined that the “death had been instantaneous, due probably to the passage of a tiny clot of blood into the Heart.” George, who was himself to die a year and a half later in October, 1935 lamented that this was the second time in 15 months that death had entered the home which he had shared for decades with his unmarried brothers and sisters.  He then went on to tell the story of Thaddeus’ life and the remarkable instrument, known as the Telharmonium, that he created.  

Thaddeus Cahill was born in Iowa on June 18th, 1867 to Dr. Timothy and Ellen Harrington Cahill.  His father was, in the words of George Cahill, “a descendent of vigorous and educated men, a Harvard Doctor and a loving parent” who cultivated the minds of his children, guided their reading and explained things to them.  Dr. Cahill didn’t bother sending young Thaddeus or his equally brilliant sister Mary to school.  Instead, he took charge of their education and they “studied and read, and discussed with him, the great thoughts of the ages from their childhood.”  In fact, Thaddeus Cahill only went to school for several months, when he enrolled as a senior in the local high school and ended up delivering the Latin oration at Commencement.  

Music was also an important part of life in the Cahill household.  George recalled that his sister Mary had been given by God “one of the richest and most musical singing voices I have ever heard, and preserved it almost to the day of her death.”  Thad, as George referred to him, choose to study the physics of music at Oberlin Conservatory after his graduation from high school and even though he attended and graduated from George Washington University Law School in 1889, he would spend most of his life involved with the two passions that would define him – inventing new electrical technologies and music.  

The time and place in which Cahill grew up was in the process of one of the most dramatic technological transformations in human history and particularly in the United States of that period, the new marvels of technology were driven by the genius of individual inventors rather than large corporations or state investment.  A person born in the United States in 1867, who lived as long as Cahill – into the 1930’s – had the experience of witnessing the birth of our modern society.  That person, as a child in the 1860’s and 70’s, would have grown up by the light of candles and oil lamps, gotten around with horses, lived in a primarily agricultural nation, and the tallest building that most likely would have ever seen would have been no more than 5 or 6 stories.  By the time that person reached their 70’s, they would live in a world of fast cars, airplanes, brightly lit cities with electricity, subways, mass produced consumer goods, skyscrapers of over 100 stories, instant nationwide communication via radio, x-rays and radiation and even telephone, records and pop music.  Essentially the basic elements of our modern society were created in the years that Cahill lived and the new force that powered it was the almost magic force of electricity.  Historian, philosopher Henry Adams, after seeing great electrical dynamos exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition, used them to symbolize a new society where humanity had harnessed new forces of “ultimate energy” unimaginable in all of previous human history.  

The widespread use of electricity had occurred almost miraculously rapidly over the course of the 19th century. In the 1830’s, British scientist Michael Faraday developed the first dynamo, or generator, and in 1878, Thomas Edison, the American inventor who also invented the audio recording with his phonograph, developed an efficient light bulb.  Edison then partnered with several of the wealthiest American industrialists of the time to create the electrical infrastructure based on direct current (DC) that would power his light bulbs, however, it was George Westinghouse with his alternating current (AC) system designed by the brilliant Nikola Tesla, that triumphed and by the 1890’s,electricity had come the urban centers of the United States and Europe. With electricity now available to power electrical devices, shortly after completing law school, Cahill, became fascinated with the new possibilities and during the 1890’s, while only in his 20’s and early 30’s, he dedicated himself to creating new electrical devices.  His first invention was an electrical typewriter – Cahill had actually worked as a stenographer at the age of 14 – and in the summer of 1901 he exhibited his invention at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York – a massive exposition of technology lit by Edison himself with power generated from the Niagara Falls and perhaps was even nearby when the U.S. President William McKinley was murdered by an anarchist – a grim episode that has forever been associated with the spectacular exhibition.  

It was also with the Cahill Electrical Typewriter that Thaddeus Cahill exhibited his first business failure.  Many of the most brilliant inventors of technology have formed legendary companies that failed, despite the genius of their products. In 2010, several of the pioneer creators of the most important electronic instruments of the late 20th century including Don Buchla, Roger Linn, Keith McMillen, Tom Oberheim, Dave Smith, John Chowning and Max Matthews began meeting every Thursday at a coffee house in Berkeley, California. They called their weekly group the “Dead Presidents Society” since most of them had been presidents of companies that died.  George Cahill, in his letter, wrote that “dissension and trickery ruined the company and wrecked the enterprise,” however, Thad would next pour his energy and ingenuity into the invention that would change the sound of music.  

Thaddeus Cahill was not the inventor of the synthesizer, which we can define as an instrument that generates sound using a physical or virtual oscillator, nor was the Telharmonium the first synth. That honor goes to his fellow Oberlin alum and professor Elisha Gray. Gray, who when he died in 1901 of a heart attack in my hometown of Newton, Massachusetts was commemorated by the Los Angeles Herald with the unfortunate obituary title: He Made Millions and Died Poor: Professor Elisha Gray Who Made Fortunes For Other Men, was one of the most proflific genius inventors of the 19th century. He would have been known as the inventor of the telephone if Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t gotten to the patent office one hour before him. His many inventions included the telautograph which was a precursor to the modern fax machine and an underwater signaling device to send messages to ships.

In 1876 Gray patented a device he called the ‘Electro-Harmonic Telegraph’ which used single note oscillators made from self vibrating electro-magnetic circuits attached to a simple keyboard. These steel reeds were vibrated by an electromagnetic current and then transmitted over telephone lines as a buzzing musical tone. Gray built a simple loudspeaker that was essentially a big telephone receiver made from a metal tub that vibrated and amplified the sound of the instrument.

Gray went on to launch the first electronic music concert series and tour. On December 29, 1874, before the device was patented, he gave a performance at Highland Park, Illinois where he demonstrated the transmission of music over the wires to a speaker. He then toured the United Kingdom and after his return, he staged concert series in 1877 where music was transmitted from Philadelphia over telephone wires to New York City’s Steinway Hall, Brooklyn’s B.A.M. (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and a venue in Washington D.C. According to the April 3rd, 1877 write-up in the New York Times, the Steinway Hall concert was completely sold out by people curious to see music transmitted electronically by wire. While the transmission of the music was successful, the New York Times‘ reviewer criticized the sound of the instrument. The listeners in Philadelphia heard just a whirring noise and a couple of bass tones. The audience in New York had a better experience and although the volume was low, the reviewer compared the sound to that of an organ. After these concerts, Gray seemingly lost interest in resolving the technological impediments to the instrument and moved on to other inventions.

Thaddeus Cahill began his work on his new instrument in the early 1890’s, almost twenty years after Gray’s Musical Telegraph. For Cahill, Gray’s instrument, although innovative, was an abysmal failure as a music-making device. When his first patent application was rejected in 1895, he wrote that the Musical Telegraph was “practically useless. No person of taste or culture could be supposed to derive any enjoyment from music rendered in poor, harsh tones with uneven power and absolutely without expression or variation.” Cahill was also influenced by the English publication in 1885 of German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1862 treatise On The Sensantions of Tone which theorized that each musical tone had a pure sine wave fundamental and when combined with higher ‘overtones’ gave each musical tone a distinctive timbre. Helmholtz created a metallic resonator that allowed the listener to isolate specific sine wave resonances. Cahill applied this concept to his invention. The Telharmonium would electrically generate perfect sine tones and create timbres through additive synthesis – layering overtones over the fundamental to create different timbres.

The Telharmonium was a technological marvel.  It was an enormous instrument that eventually weighed 210 tons in its final incarnation.  It used tonewheels to generate musical sounds – these were metal wheels with precisely cut teeth or lobes that were mounted on shafts that would rotate at constant rotational speeds within a magnetic field, inducing electromagnetic oscillations and creating sine waves. A keyboard controller was played by a musician and a large room directly below it that consisted of large tonewheels.  It produced the fundamental of a note (the frequency that determines the pitch) and the overtones (the higher frequencies that determine the quality or timbre) separately so that a musician could, as the New International Encyclopedia wrote at the time, “produce at will the notes of practically any instrument, and and even notes of an entirely new quality.”  Not only that, but Cahill made the loudness of each note respond instantly to the pressure of the finger on the key of the Telharmonium.  

Cahill’s Telharmonium was so remarkable that contemporary musicians and scientists around the world recognized it as marking the beginning of a new era of music.  Enrico Caruso, one of the first global pop stars, declared that it would “bring a revolution into the musical world, both through its artistic expression and by bringing really good music to all kinds of people.”  The emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary sent representatives to see Cahill’s creation, while the French ambassador to the United States made the trip up from Washington to Cahill’s Lowell workshop himself.  Lord Kelvin, perhaps England’s foremost late-19th century scientist called it one of the “greatest accomplishments of the brain of man,” while in Italy, composer and intellectual Ferruccio Busoni was so impressed by the new machine that in his influential 1907 manifesto “Sketch of New Aesthetic of Music” he declared that its possibilities would open a “vista of fair hopes and dreamlike fancies” for musicians of coming generations.” Mark Twain wrote “Every time I see or hear a new wonder like this, I have to postpone my death right off.  I couldn’t possibly leave the world until I have heard this again and again.”

The genius of Cahill’s vision was apparent as well in the way in which the music would be transmitted.  In a time before radio – or even electrical speakers – and over a century before streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, he had a vision of the Telharmonium as the center of a subscription-based music service. In 1906, Cahill and the New England Electric Music Company brought an instrument down to New York in 30 railway flatcars where it was set up at “Telharmonic Hall” on 39th Street and Broadway.  There, they hoped to pipe music into New York’s exclusive restaurants and hired musicians to play on the piano keyboard that they had attached to the device.  The New England Electric Music Company built a music broadcasting network over the telephone lines and it was piped through to ordinary telephone receivers with a horn that Cahill designed for them to amplify the sound.  At Telharmonic Hall, Cahill had telephone receivers hidden behind ferns and lobby furniture and even created a light show by connecting the current of the Telharmonium to overhead arc lamps.

Unfortunately, Cahill was too far ahead of his time. He proposed many of the ways in which music is used today – music pumped into workplaces and homes that would be accessible at all times and help cure the nervous disorders of modern life. (https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/dewan.php)  Yet, the technological limitations of the early 20th century were too great to realize his vision at that moment in history.  The Telharmonium music sounded abysmal through telephone receivers (one listener called it “highly irritating)” and even worse caused interference in the regular phone service as it would blow out switching systems. Radio and the First World War destroyed the New England Electric Music Company and before 1920 the instrument was removed from Telharmonium Hall and scrapped.  Thaddeus Cahill, however, had introduced the world to electrically generated music and in 1934, the same year as Cahill’s death, inventor Lawrence Hammond patented his Hammond Organ, essentially a mini Telharmonium using Cahill’s tonewheel technology, that would profoundly influence global music in the mid-20th century and the subsequent synthesizers that followed.   

Dan Freeman is a producer, bassist and music technologist based in New York City. He is currently an Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music where he specializes in synthesis and sound design. He is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School’s Center for Creative Technologies. He produces from his production suite in New York City Studios north of Union Square and is the Director/Founder of the Brooklyn Digital Conservatory.