The Drum Machine Everyone Hated at First

The first drum machine was made for organists who had nobody to play with. In 1959 the American firm Wurlitzer released a box called the Sideman, meaning the accompanist, which used vacuum tubes to imitate a dozen percussion instruments and could tap out twelve preset rhythms, from waltz to foxtrot, at any tempo. You could not play anything of your own on it: the musician chose a rhythm the way you choose a program on a washing machine and played over the top.

The Japanese engineer Ikutaro Kakehashi was born in 1930 in Osaka, lost both parents to tuberculosis as a child and was raised by his grandparents. In 1947, at seventeen, he started repairing watches and radios. As a student he caught tuberculosis himself and ended up in a sanatorium, where a drug that was new at the time, streptomycin, was tested on him. He survived, and by twenty-eight he had decided he would make electronic instruments for amateurs who had never studied music and could not pay for expensive instruments.