S q u e e z y t u n e s

1938 Ford Truck Calliope

Compare this with the Smart Car I featured yesterday. This is a 1938 Ford Truck with a circa 1920 National Calliope Model B 955 fitted in the back. The calliope plays manually or automatically with paper rolls. The truck is decorated with rounding boards from a carousel dated about 1895 giving this a true element of the fairground.

Orpheus Music Box

This is an Orpheus Music Box, or mechanical zither. As you might imagine you turn the crank which rotates the disk and so produces music. Apparently these were made in Germany from the 1880s and are quite rare. This one attracted lots of bids on Ebay and eventually sold for US $3,200 (£1,628).

clipped from cgi.ebay.co.uk clipped from cgi.ebay.co.uk clipped from cgi.ebay.co.uk clipped from cgi.ebay.co.uk

Hicks Salon Barrel Piano

This mighty beast is a Joseph Hicks 41-key salon barrel piano made in London in the first half of the 19th century. In an impressive rosewood cabinet containing an extra 10-tune barrel. The Hicks family made barrel pianos and organs in several shops in England (notably Bristol); they even had a branch of the family in New York City. Their output was primarily street instruments used by buskers in England and the United States. This rare exception was built for home use. It was on Ebay with a starting bid of £3,200 US but failed to attract any bidders.

clipped from cgi.ebay.co.uk

clipped from cgi.ebay.co.uk

clipped from cgi.ebay.co.uk

Piano Melodico

This may look like some kind of printing press but it's actually a Piano Melodico. Invented by Giovanni Racca from Italy they were made between the late 1800s up to about 1920-5. One of the problems of music boxes which use barrels or disks to contain the music is that the music will only last one turn of the barrel or disk. This limits them to playing only short tunes. The music for a Melodico though was contained in a book of folded cardboard with punched holes marking the notes. This meant that longer pieces of music could successfully be played.

Link: More information about Piano Melodicos on this wonderful museum site

Concert Roller Organ

Back in May I featured a Gem Roller Organ. It was a nice music box type of thing, but at the time I didn't realise that these roller organs don't have metal tines, or strings, but instead they have reeds !

There are three real audio files on Todd Augsburger's Roller Organ site (link below)

This is a Concert Roller model which sold for £409 on Ebay.

And this Chatauqua model sold for £353.









Link: Todd Augsburger's Roller Organ Website
Previously on Squeezytunes: Gem Roller Organ