Electronic Dance Music Origin 8/14

Okay, so that wasn't the first electronic instrument ever. But I think I got it now. The first electronic instrument was invented in 1897.
For real this time. I'm sure of it. 1897 is when it all began. Nothing earlier.
For it was in 1897 that a little thing (which, of course, was anything but little) called the Telharmonium was developed, by a guy named Thaddeus Cahill.

He originally called it the Dynamophone, and it took ten years for him to actually get a working model up and running to produce any sounds,
but he filed the patent in 1897, back when he came up with the idea,
and by that I mean back when filing a patent for your ideas was more important than actually doing anything about them.

I'm not making this up: The Telharmonium was 200 tons, the size of a hydroelectric power station,
and was operated with large levels and gear shafts. It had a massive keyboard with something like 36 keys per octive.
36-key scale! Who the fuck would want to make music with a 36-key scale?!
It also had gigantic rivets and pistons and valves and steam coming out of solid iron smokestacks above it.
It was truly a masterpiece of steampunk engineering. Amplifiers did not exist back then,
so the only way to hear whatever grinding noises it made was to hook up one of those new-fangled telephone things to it and and put the receiver next to your ear.
It was like the first Walkman. A Walkman that you could actually walk inside, instead of taking it with you.
They later figured out how to play it for rooms of audiences by attaching a megaphone to the telephone receiver.
So the sound it made was like a really old, 8khz crappy analog phone conversation. Like someone talking into their fist.
This is not ghetto. This is seriously genius stuff for the Victorian era.

In all, three Telharmoniums were made. Being the size of battleships, it took a couple years to build each one.
Each one was bigger than the last, too. Everyone was obsessed with size in those days, so they had to be.
The last one was finished in 1911, where it promptly hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden concerto, taking over 1500 listeners to a watery grave.

They were going to build more, but production was halted by the first World War,
and then Thaddeus' ultimate evil master plan of brainwashing the world by filling the telephone airwaves with seductive Telharmonium music,
commanding the filthy peons to do his bidding, was thwarted by a much more insidious technology that filled the masses' heads with far more potent drivel:
Radio. With the rise of radio and amplification technology in the 20s, the Telharmonium's purpose was rendered moot, forever resigned as the Beta of the electronic music family.

Today, no recording of what the Telharmonium must have sounded like exists, though if you want a general idea,
just pick up any generalized Hammond Organ. It was built on the same principal. The last Telharmonium was sold as scrap in 1950,
because no one wanted it. Not that they'd want to. Where would you find the room for such a beast, and what would you do with it after the novelty wore off?
I guess donate it to some kind of electronic music Hall of Fame museum, if one exists. Does it? Shit, someone should apply for a grant for something like this.
It would be awesome! I say it should go in Detroit, because.....well, who's going to argue with that? (shut up, Chicago)

Fuente: Ishkur's Guide