INTRODUCTION

Mechanical Music refers to instruments that play music by automated mechanisms rather than directly by a human.  The world of Mechanical Music dates back to the 1300’s when Carillons were first operated by a barrel with pins stuck in them.  As the barrel turned, the pins would hit levers that would ring the bells.

In 1796, the first patent for a music box was granted to a Swiss watchmaker.  Building on the Carillon technology, early music boxes consisted of tuned metal prongs that were struck by pins on a disk.  Then, fairly rapidly, the Swiss developed the cylinder box.  These boxes were often very plain and a cylinder with pins that struck metal prongs or “teeth” produced the music.  A new industry was born centered in Geneva, St. Croix and L’Auberge, Switzerland.  By the late l800’s cylinder boxes were developed to play up to 12 tunes and other instrumentation was added including organs, bells and automated figures.  Unfortunately, the physics of the cylinder limited the capability of these cylinder boxes.  The more tunes on a cylinder, the shorter and less musically complex each tune could be.

In the mid-1880’s, the Germans invented the disk box.  A metal record, with indentations underneath, plucked the teeth on a disk box.  Now, the customer could have an almost unlimited supply of music since many disks could be played on a single box.  This invention was the forerunner of the record.  Over the next decade, the Germans pretty well forced the Swiss out of business.  Polyphon was the largest German manufacturer and an interesting anecdote is that some engineers spun out of Polyphon and came to the U.S. to form a company called Regina.  Regina developed an “auto-changer” capable of playing 12 metal disks.  The auto-changer was the forerunner of today’s CD player.  When the Edison phonograph became popular and began to put the disk box manufacturers out of business, Regina converted their production to the manufacture of vacuum cleaners.  If you buy a Regina vacuum cleaner today, it is the same company that made wonderful music machines a hundred years ago!

In parallel with the music box industry, manufacturers of organs and later, pianos also extended the carillon barrel technology into automated music instruments.  The Germans, French and the Dutch developed Fairground organs (we might think of these as Carousel organs).  These were used in traveling fairs and produced happy and loud music to attract crowds.  Originally, a human turned a crank on a barrel and the pins on the barrel operated the organ.

In the mid-1880’s, Welte invented a technology that replaced the barrel with a paper roll.  This was a huge advance and led to the development of the player piano and later the punched card computer.  In addition to the Fairground organ, a class of instruments known as Orchestrions was developed.  These instruments were designed to produce very fine music that imitated a full orchestra.  Again these started out as barrel driven and were later converted to rolls.

CLICK HERE for an historical timeline of developments in the mechanical music industry.

Our collection began in March 1997 when we went into an antique store and saw a disk music box.  Incredibly, neither of us had ever seen or heard of such an instrument and had no idea that they could be collected.  When the box was played, the room filled with the most glorious music and we were hooked.  After searching the Internet, we found a whole group of collectors and we embarked on a steep learning curve.  Our first purchase, a Regina Autochanger, was in April 1997.  Today, our collection consists of over 40 pieces.  We buy pieces internationally and have restoration projects underway or completed in Canada and Germany.  This website is designed to provide descriptive and historical information about the pieces, some of which are quite rare.