What was the first-ever electric musical instrument?
To say we take electronic music for granted in the 21st century would be a considerable understatement. With the occasional folk revival or sea shanty aside, virtually every note of popular music we listen to today is electrified and enhanced at one stage or another, to the point where a 12-year-old with GarageBand can now conduct a fairly believable orchestra with the flick of a thumb. With this in mind, you might expect that mankind’s leap from acoustic to electric sound would be remembered and celebrated as a singular breakthrough moment, not unlike the Wright Brothers taking flight in 1903. Trying to pinpoint the first true electric musical instrument is a tad more complicated, though.
To stick with the aeronautical comparison, the Wright Brothers are credited with the first manned flight, but they didn’t invent the aeroplane. Similarly, there were many inventors who attempted to marry electricity with musical instruments from the 18th century onward, some with better success than others. The question is: what makes an electric instrument viable? Is it simply that some form of amplification or sonic transformation is caused by electronic influence? Or is an instrument only an instrument if it can be manufactured, re-created, and played by someone outside of a laboratory?
If you subscribe to the first definition, then the case could be made that the first electronic instrument was the Denis D’or, aka the “Golden Dionysus”, an experimental electro-magnetic keyboard designed by the Czech scientist Václav Prokop Diviš around 1748. Unfortunately, evidence for the actual success of that instrument is scant, so another worthy contender is the Clavecin Électrique, an “electric harpsichord” built by a French Jesuit priest named Jean-Baptiste Delaborde in 1759. According to the website 120 Years of Electronic Music, “The Clavecin Électrique was not a stringed instrument but a carillon type keyboard instrument using a static electrical charge.” Even this invention, though, borrowed from an earlier innovation by the American engineer Ebenezer Kinnersley, whose electrified eight-bell instrument earned an early fan in Benjamin Franklin back in 1747.
On both sides of the Atlantic, it certainly appeared that electronic music was about to blow up in the late 1700s, but then, perhaps as a result of various wars and revolutions, things slowed down considerably. Finally, in the 1860s, there was a fresh development, as Matthias Hipp’s “Electromechanical Piano” helped launch the era of the “player piano”. Hugely popular up through the 1920s, player pianos were operated by air passing through perforated paper rolls, which then triggered the hammers on the piano to play a tune without the need for human hands. Most of these early automatic pianos relied on pneumatic tubes powered by a foot pedal, but some employed electromagnets, as well.
As a unique breakthrough of the same period, Elisha Gray collected a patent for his “Musical Telegraph” in 1876—the very same year he built his prototype for a telephone (a patent battle he would eventually lose to Alexander Graham Bell).
“My invention,” Gray wrote in his patent application for the Musical Telegraph, “primarily consists in a novel art of producing musical impressions or sounds by means of a series of properly-tuned vibrating reeds or bars thrown into action by means of a series of keys opening or closing electric circuits. It also consists of a novel art of transmitting tunes so produced through an electric circuit and reproducing them at the receiving end of the line”.
Gray’s telegraph was hugely influential in how electricity could be used to transmit sound, but it’s hard to call it a musical instrument in any practical sense. The same could be said of some of the important designs that followed, including Thaddeus Cahill’s “Telharmonium” in 1897 and William Duddel’s “Singing Arc” in 1898. It wasn’t until 1915, with the introduction of Lee de Forest’s “Audion Piano,” that we really approached something one might recognise as a fully electronic instrument with mainstream playing potential.
As 120 Years of Electronic Music describes it, “de Forest’s instrument was the first true electronic musical instrument in that it generated sound from electrical oscillations (rather than, say, the electro-mechanical generation of sound by the Telharmonium). As such, it was the precursor for all the future developments in electronic musical instruments design.”
From the Audion forward, the Golden Age of electronic music innovation began, with highlights including the Theremin (1920), Orgue des Ondes (1928), and the first Hammond Organ (1935).
Hammond Organs are probably best remembered for their use in 1960s jazz and rock music (think of the Hammond B3 sound on Booker T and the MG’s ‘Green Onions’), but for several decades prior, these instruments—devised by Chicago-based wunderkind Laurens Hammond—arguably became the first mass-produced, popular, and easily playable electronic instruments; briefly outselling the equally novel electric guitar.
So, what should we consider the first electric musical instrument? Unfortunately, no single invention or inventor will ever have the bragging rights all to themselves. But maybe it’s better to recognise everyone who chipped in. After all, there were a lot of forgotten figures who ran (and nosedived) so that the Wright Brothers could fly.
