On December 7, 1877, Thomas Edison entered the offices of Scientific American in New York and placed a metal device on a desk. With a turn of the crank, Edison astonished the dozen employees gathered around the machine.
The machine spoke. “Hello,” he said in Edison’s voice. “How are you doing?”
SciAmThe editors of described the demonstration in the issue of December 22, 1877. “There is no doubt,” they write, “that the inflections are those of nothing other than the human voice. » The report was accompanied by a detailed sketch of Edison’s device, which the inventor called a phonograph.Virtually overnight, the article catapulted Edison to fame and established the phonograph as the first machine to record and reproduce human speech.
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But was it?
On May 15, 2026, at annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in Memphis, audio historian Patrick Feaster proposed another candidate for the title: a recording machine that would have predated Edison’s by nearly a century.
Feaster, a tenacious researcher with a photographic mind for all things phonographic, began investigating this possibility more than 20 years earlier, when he came across a German paper from the early 1900s examining mechanical devices that synthesized (but did not record) certain human speech sounds. The article mentioned a man identified only by his last name, Müller, who had exhibited some kind of talking machine in the 1780s. Although the author of the article called Müller’s machine an obvious hoax, Feaster was intrigued.
His casual investigations over the next two decades revealed additional references to Müller and his “talking machine,” including a book describing the device dating from 1788, the same year the machine was exhibited in Erlangen, Germany.
Feaster found two eyewitness accounts that agreed on details. The talking machine was apparently about 3.5 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall, deep, and flanked by two life-size human figures, a man and a woman. Each character placed one hand on a piece of furniture featuring 34 “speaking mechanisms” resembling organ pipes, as well as levers, rollers, cylinders, clockwork mechanisms and 10 bellows. But Feaster also found other accounts describing Müller’s device as a puppet that conversed with the audience.
Artist’s impression of a speaking device exhibited in the 1780s by Georg Theodor Jacob Müller. According to eyewitnesses, sounds were coming out of the mouths of both figures.
Patrick Feaster/Maria Amador
In January, Feaster made a surprising discovery: There were two Müllers, and both demonstrated talking machines in Germany in the 1780s. (Neither device survives.)
One of them, Laurentius Müller, actually employed a talking puppet, which was documented as a hoax. The other Müller, Georg Theodor Jacob Müller, was passionate about medicine and mechanical sciences. Feaster said he was impressed by several contemporary accounts of Georg Theodor Jacob Müller’s machine, including an account by physicist Johann Tobias Mayer.
According to Mayer’s account, sounds passed from the top of the machine through tubes that carried the vibrations up the two characters’ arms and into their mouths, producing distinct male and female voices. “No one will be convinced that the human voice was reproduced perfectly,” Mayer noted, but if the numbers were removed and listeners pressed their ears directly to the hole at the top of the cabinet, the speech became clearer.
The machine’s repertoire included answers to 12 riddles, passages from books, sounds of laughter, crying and kissing, as well as tunes sung with male and female voices – all feats that Edison’s phonograph would one day be capable of accomplishing by recording and reproducing the human voice.
However, like his contemporaries, Mayer took it for granted that the device was a fake. “Everyone thought that no machine could Really do what Müller was supposed to do,” says Feaster.
Two features, however, lend credence to the idea that the device was not a hoax. Müller mentioned that his machine used an artificial ear, a mechanism simulating the human eardrum that captured the sound of air and was used in the 1780s as a hearing aid. An artificial ear could have been part of a recording device.
The second notable feature involved an echo. When audience members spoke three or four words into the ear of one of the characters, they would hear what seemed to be those same three or four words in their own voices after a while. A natural echo with a delay long enough for these words to be spoken clearly would require a volume of space larger than the interior of Müller’s study. So if the repeated words weren’t an echo, Müller might have used some sort of mechanical technology to record and play them back.
“Even if Müller was a fraud,” says Jacob Smith, a media historian at Northwestern University, “Patrick [Feaster] gave us a richer picture of the horizon of imagination surrounding talking machines long before Edison.
Feaster has already helped rewrite the history of artificial ears. In 2008, he and several of his fellow sound historians established that an invention from the late 1850s was likely the first to capture sounds. on paper. The phonautograph, a device invented by a French composer, channeled sound vibrations from an artificial ear to a stylus which transcribed these vibrations onto soot-coated paper in the form of seismograph-like tracings. Feaster and his collaborators even managed to use digital technology to turn these traces of soot into an audio recording: breaths that once passed through human lips.
The invention that Edison introduced into the offices of Scientific American He also used sound vibrations to vibrate a needle, in his case, making grooves in a strip of aluminum foil or paper embossed with wax. When he traced the grooves with a stylus, it reproduced the sound that had been recorded.
“In my course on the history of recorded sound,” Smith says, “students are always surprised at how ‘low-tech’ [the phonograph] is and that, technically speaking, it could have been invented much earlier.
Maybe it was.
For now, Feaster says, the evidence that Georg Theodor Jacob Müller created a version of a phonograph remains intriguing, inconclusive and elusive. This doesn’t mean he’s giving up. This week, Feaster is in Germany looking for more clues.
