When you look through the exhibit at our forms of musical entertainment through the years, you see that people became more and more interested in having machines to make music at home. This desire coincided with the eras of the Industrial Revolution, when inventors everywhere were bringing ideas to life. Some of these early inventions never made it off the drawing board while others took hold and improved over time.
In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the record player and radio began their evolutionary journey. While people found these inventions interesting, many found the quality of the music to be uneven and less than enjoyable.
Enter the Player Piano in 1896. Edwin S. Votey invented the first practical pneumatic player pianos, also called “pianolas”. These pianos were acoustic and originally cost $250.00.
The player piano was operated by foot. Pressing down caused the bellows to provide a vacuum which then operated the pneumatic motor which drove the spools. The spools were made of paper and were the “music rolls” for the piano.
To make the spools, music was laid out on continuous sheets of paper by stenciling. Holes were made by a punch or perforating machine. The paper was then rolled up to a size that fit into the piano’s player box. The free end was hooked to a “take up spool”. As these spools unwound, it would pass across a reading machine which was called a “tracker box” and this would create the music.
Once the pneumatic motor drove the spool, a small in rush of air was forced through a hole in the paper roll and amplified in two stages to have enough strength to strike a note. The sound was then produced by hammers inside the piano striking piano strings.
By 1903, companies were doing big business making the music rolls. At least one company had a catalogue of more than 9000 rolls.
Over time, record players produced a clearer, truer sound and moved to two-sided discs and they cut into the popularity of the player piano. While many early record players were a fairly large piece of furniture, they took up much less room than a player piano. The end of the player piano came with the Stock Market Crash of 1929 which put an end to the industry.
We don’t have a player piano (though we would like one), but we do have a pump and quite a few music rolls from the COA, some of which are shown here. We shared some of the rolls with the Middleboro Historical Museum (they have a piano). The ones we kept cover military, holiday and show tunes.
Thanks to Sue LaFleur for the research that supported this article.
By Connie Eshbach