The Symphonium company started business in 1885 as the first manufacturers of disc-playing music boxes. Two of the founders of the company, Gustave Brachhausen and Paul Riessner, left to set up a new firm,
Polyphon, in direct competition with their original business and their third partner, Oscar Paul Lochmann. Following the establishment of the Original Musikwerke Paul Lochmann in 1900, the founding Symphonion business continued until 1909. According to the Victoria Museums in Australia, "The Symphonion is notable for the enormous diversity of types, styles, and models produced... No other disc-playing musical box exists in so many varieties. The company also pioneered the use of electric motors... the first model fitted with an electric motor being advertised in 1900. The company moved into the piano-orchestrion business and made both disc-operated and barrel-playing models, player-pianos, and phonographs." The Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, USA has a notable collection, including interactive exhibits. In addition to video and audio footage of each piece, the actual instruments are demonstrated for the public daily on a rotational basis.
Timeline 9th century: In
Baghdad, the
Banū Mūsā brothers, a trio of
Persian inventors, produced "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument", in this case a
hydropowered
organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically, which they described in their
Book of Ingenious Devices. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century." Early 13th century: In
Flanders, an ingenious bell ringer invented a cylinder with pins which operates cams, which then hit the bells. 1665: Ahasuerus Fromanteel in London mades a table clock which has quarter striking and musical work on multiple bells operated by a pinned barrel. These barrels could be changed for those playing different tunes. 1772: A watch was made by one Ransonet at Nancy,
France which has a pinned drum, playing music not on bells but on tuned steel prongs arranged vertically. 1796:
Antoine Favre-Salomon, a clockmaker from
Geneva replaced the stack of bells by a comb with multiple pre-tuned metallic notes in order to reduce space. Together with a horizontally placed pinned barrel, this produced more varied and complex sounds. One of these first music boxes is now displayed at the
Shanghai Gallery of Antique Music Boxes and Automata in
Pudong's
Oriental Art Center. 1877:
Thomas Edison invents the
phonograph, which has important consequences for the musical-box industry, especially around the end of the century. In 2010 American jazz guitarist
Pat Metheny released the album
Orchestrion on which he performed alongside a variety of custom-designed and built acoustic and electromechanical
orchestrions which comprised the rest of the "band", playing music in real-time through the
MIDI file format. ==Repertoire==