Before the New Year, we brought you footage of Russ­ian poly­math­ic inven­tor Léon Theremin demon­strat­ing the strange instru­ment that bears his sur­name, and we not­ed that the Theremin was the first elec­tron­ic instru­ment. This is not strict­ly true, though it is the first elec­tron­ic instru­ment to be mass pro­duced and wide­ly used in orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion and per­for­mance. But like bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, the his­to­ry of musi­cal instru­ment devel­op­ment is lit­tered with dead ends, anom­alies, and for­got­ten ances­tors (such as the octo­bass). One such obscure odd­i­ty, the Tel­har­mo­ni­um, appeared almost 20 years before the Theremin, and it was patent­ed by its Amer­i­can inven­tor, Thad­deus Cahill, even ear­li­er, in 1897. (See some of the many dia­grams from the orig­i­nal patent below.) Cahill, a lawyer who had pre­vi­ous­ly invent­ed devices for pianos and type­writ­ers, cre­at­ed the Telharmonium—also called the Dynamaphone—to broad­cast music over the tele­phone, mak­ing it a pre­cur­sor not to the Theremin but to the lat­er scourge of tele­phone hold music. “In a large way,” writes Jay Willis­ton at Synthmuseum.com, “Cahill invent­ed what we know of today as …