Now, before we begin with today's lesson, I would like to relate a few facts about the synthesizer's history and the men who so valiantly labored to explain the instrument to me.

In 1910 a wonderously mad musician, named Thaddeus Cahill, put together a steam-powered machine which he called the Tel-Harmonium. This awesome 200-ton device was constructed to play a somewhat limited range of tones through the telephone lines. The Tel-Harmonium was portable, in that it was housed atop something like seventeen flatbed railroad cars. Perhaps portable is a bad word—I mean, can you imagine Edgar Winter stringing that thing around his neck?— call it mobile. Anyways, Thaddeus happily diddled away on his instrument over the phone lines late at night while everybody slejM: and i didn't make ( phone calls that would interfere with his music. Thaddeus Cahill with his Tel-Harmonium is, as far as \X/e know, the father of the modern electronic synthesizer (and probalby a great-uncle to today's Phone Phreaks). (InformaL tion courtesy of Dr. Tom Rhea.)