The Apollonicon was presented to the public the first time in 1817 built by the English

Organ builder Organ building is the profession of designing, building, restoring and maintaining pipe organs. The Organ builders , organ builder usually receives a commission to design an organ with a particular disposition of Organ stop, stops, Manual (mu ...

s Flight & Robson in London. It was an automatic playing machine with about 1,900 pipes and 45

organ stop An organ stop is a component of a pipe organ that admits pressurized air (known as ''wind'') to a set of organ pipes. Its name comes from the fact that stops can be used selectively by the organist; each can be "on" (admitting the passage of air ...

s with a technic familiar to the

barrel organ A barrel organ (also called roller organ or crank organ) is a French mechanical musical instrument consisting of bellows and one or more ranks of pipes housed in a case, usually of wood, and often highly decorated. The basic principle is the sa ...

. It was inspired by

Johann Nepomuk Mälzel A metronome by Maelzel, Paris, 1815. Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (or Mälzel; August 15, 1772 – July 21, 1838) was a German inventor, engineer, and showman, best known for manufacturing a metronome and several music-playing automatons, and displayin ...

Panharmonikon The Panharmonicon was a musical instrument invented in 1805 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, a contemporary and friend of Beethoven. Beethoven composed his piece " Wellington's Victory" (Op. 91) to be played on Mälzel's mechanical orchestral organ ...

. It also had five keyboards, one of them used as the

pedal keyboard A pedalboard (also called a pedal keyboard, pedal clavier, or, with electronic instruments, a bass pedalboard) is a keyboard played with the feet that is usually used to produce the low-pitched bass line of a piece of music. A pedalboard has long ...

, so the instrument could be played by a few persons in manual mode as well. A very detailed description with drawings can be found in the ''Mechanics Magazine'' from 1828. A notice about it is to be found in ''Polytechnisches Journal'', 1828, with the Germanized name ''Apollonikon''.

References

External links

Description at the British Institute of Organ Studies, with drawings and a bibliography

Keyboard instruments Aerophones Mechanical musical instruments 1817 introductions {{FreeReed-instrument-stub