Juniata sentinel and Republican. [volume] (Mifflintown, Juniata County, Pa.) 1873-1955, 1890-10-29
THE PLANO HAND ORGANS.
How Those Popular Instruments of the
Street are Made.

How Those Popular Instruments of the
Street are Made.
Their musical merits aside, the
mechanical pianos trundled about the
streets by the re-established peripatetic
performers are remarkable affairs.
The principal on which they are made
is, of course, well known. They arc
enlarged music boxes, the hammers
that strike the wires being set in action
by coming in contact with minute pegs
set in cylinder that extends the whole
length of the frame, or, popularity, the
key board. In the largest of these
pianos the cylinder is pegged to play
ten tunes, and it takes one complete
revolution of the cylinder to finish oEe
tune. After that the performer may
continue TO grind out the same tune
again, or by moving lever push tue
cylinder forward by as muGh as the
width of one peg, and so bring out q
different piece. These pegs are not
90 DlOao oo a pm llpdNA1 oIlb hAAC
fact that, unpleasant as the machines
are TO a trained ear, they rarely if ever
k'trike false notes, is evidence of the
care and nicely employed in their con-
struction. For, in machine peggcd
for ten times, the cylinder is simply
black with the pegs, and the slightest
inaccuracy in placing them would bring
out q wrong note somewhere.
The relation of the pegs to the ham,
mers may be understood if one laws
his two hands side by side upon the
table, palms down. The fingers and
thumbs may represent the pegs, each
peg playing its part in the different
tunes. The space between the levers
which one peg lifts is just wide
enough to pass nine other pegs. 1t
happens, of course, that the same note
does not occur in every one of the ten
tunes; in that case no peg would be
driven in the line of ten when it came
to setting the cylinder for this especial
piece.
A manufacturer in New York makes
most if not all of the mechanical
pianos heard on the streets in this
neighborhood. He makes everything
in his own establishment.
"There," he said, pointing to a pile
of lumber, "are well-seasoned boards
that are being kept for working into
frames and other parts of the piano.
There is the machine for making the
wires. And all through the house are
materials for the various parts of the
instruments and the tools for pusing
them into shape. If kept within doors
and played moderately like a house
piano, it would remain in good tune
for many weeks; in fact, as long as
the swell instruments. Played out of
The exposure to weather and the
! rumbling over rough pavements, as
well as constant playing, briggs this
about. The men who have pianos in
use bring them in here on an average
81 once in two weeks TO get them re-
tuned. OF course, another influence
to put them out of tune is the extreme
force with which the wires are struck"
chow is music adjusted to the cylin
der?"
at requires not only musician, but
man who understands the mechan-
ism of the machine to do Slis. The
first thing after selecting the compost
ton is to buy the piano score. Then
the musician takes sheet of paper just
large enough to cover the cylinder
entirely, and writes the piece upon it
in dots. The dots correspond TO the
pegs. The musician, of course, knows
the mechanism, so that he can tell
where to place a dot to bring out the
corresponding tone. When he has
marked the paper over, a mechanic
uses it for chart, and drives pegs
into the cylinder exactly on the spots
indicated by the dots. But the musi-
clans part is by no means limited TO a
mere transfer of the composition from
one style of notation, as it were, to
another. If that were done the effect
would be feeble ana utterly unintercst-
ing. The mechanical piano has its
own characteristics, and the musician
must understand them so that he can
double notes in a chord, and even
quadrupIe them, in order 90 make the
sound tell in the open air. As a mat
ter of fact, piece played on me-
chanicsl piano is substantially the
same as if it were arranged for eight
hands on two parlor pianos"