The Organette was a mechanical free-

reed Reed or Reeds may refer to: Science, technology, biology, and medicine * Reed bird (disambiguation) * Reed pen, writing implement in use since ancient times * Reed (plant), one of several tall, grass-like wetland plants of the order Poales * Re ...

programmable (automatic) musical instrument first manufactured in the late 1870s by several companies such as John McTammany of

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

, the Autophone Company of

Ithaca, New York Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named a ...

, the Automatic Organ Co of

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, Massachusetts, E.P. Needham & Sons of

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, J.M. Draper of

Blackburn Blackburn () is an industrial town and the administrative centre of the Blackburn with Darwen borough in Lancashire, England. The town is north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the Ribble Valley, east of Preston and north-n ...

, England, Paul Ehrlich & Co. of

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

, Germany, and The Mechanical Orguinette Co. of New York, NY as well as other manufacturers worldwide. The organette (or orguinette) used rolls of perforated paper, perforated cardboard, perforated metal disks and wooden rollers (or "cobs") on which the music was programmed.

Musical scale In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale. Often, especially in the ...

s ranged from 14 to 39 notes depending on the instrument's complexity. Air pressure or vacuum was produced by hand-, crank- or foot-operated mechanical

bellows A bellows or pair of bellows is a device constructed to furnish a strong blast of air. The simplest type consists of a flexible bag comprising a pair of rigid boards with handles joined by flexible leather sides enclosing an approximately airtigh ...

. The organette was compact and affordable with large selections of music available. Various patents credit

Henry Bishop Horton Henry Bishop Horton (September 1, 1819, in Winchester, Connecticut – December 3, 1885, in Ithaca, New York) was an American inventor, remembered chiefly for his inventions in automatic music players and clock-making. Around 1823, his famil ...

(1819-1885; co-founder of the Ithaca Calendar Clock Co),

John McTammany John McTammany (1845–1915) was a Scottish-born American inventor who is credited with a number of patents. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager and served in the Civil War. From 1880 through 1892, he focused on automatic player pian ...

(1845-1915), Paul Ehrlich and others with inventing the organette. The organette's popularity declined as the

phonograph A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...

was introduced and became more affordable. ''The most remarkable feature of this invention is the regularity and perfection with which the music is rendered. All of the parts are played and the music is of no mean order.'' ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it i ...

'' (19 November 1879)

References

External links

* * * * Organs (music) {{FreeReed-instrument-stub