Her handbag can talk. It’s a kind of proto-Walkman, a portable record player called Solocast. And it played some of the first audio guides that Mia rented to visitors.
Actually, it’s not clear that the arrangement ever got that far. Solocast solicited the museum’s director, who seemed eager to buy. And there’s some correspondence about placing orders. Indeed, the device must have been hard to resist: Solocast’s mission was “To carry any kind of audio programming to anyone, anywhere, at any time, in any language.” And it had already recorded guides for national monuments in Washington, D.C., by the time it began courting Mia in the mid-1960s with the promise that “Narratives never take the ‘cute’ approach” and “never address the user as ‘we’—any more than a well-produced radio program would.”
A team of researchers, writers, actors, and producers at Solocast created scripts and recorded their stories on multiple seven-inch 45s. The records could be had by museums for about 50 cents or less, the player for about $150.
But what became of any scripts that Mia might have ordered is unknown. And all that remains of the Solocast Company itself, at least on the Internet, are references to its once remarkable patents.