In 1893 an inventor from Washington, D.C. named Thaddeus Cahill was experimenting with telephone transmissions when he had a novel idea: He noticed that when an electric generator sent current down a phone line, it created a tone in the earpiece. And different frequencies of current created different tones.
Cahill quickly realized that if he had 12 dynamos - each corresponding to a note on the scale - he could send music over phone lines. He spent the next four years perfecting the idea, and in 1897 received a patent for the telharmonium, not only the world's first significant electric musical instrument - but the first one that could be potentially heard by thousands of people at once.
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