Tolstoy and Chill

In 1883, Evert Nymanover, a Swedish scholar at the University of Minnesota, proposed a new invention that some thought would affect the future of humankind: a device that played recordings of books. Nymanover called the device a “whispering machine” and suggested that it could be placed inside of a hat so that someone walking down the street or reclining in bed “could be perpetually listening” to great works of literature.

Though mocked by some, Nymanover’s vision of a book recording in a hat wasn’t entirely far-fetched in 1883. After announcing the invention of the phonograph six years earlier, Thomas Edison turned almost immediately to the device’s implications for literature. He hoped to open a publishing house in New York that would sell novels recorded on six-inch circular plates. “The advantages of such books over those printed,” Edison wrote, “are too readily seen to need mention.” And Edison wasn’t the only one who thought listening to books would be obviously superior to reading. An 1885 essay in the influential British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century maintained that Nymanover’s whispering machine would be a “boon to our poor abused eyes,” and also that when we read print, “one half the power of literature is lost.”

It took a full century, but the technology finally article on stagnating audiobook sales, one Random House executive lamented that “too many people still think audio books are only for the blind.”