Who doesn’t know the music boxes? If you are someone who does not know this tool, you might be from a century of emptiness or maybe you don’t care about antiques. The music box that we often see in many horror films was found by a watchmaker. Here’s a brief history of the music box that many people don’t know about.
In 1796, a watchmaker from Geneva (Switzerland), Antoine Favre-Salomon created a pocket watch, with mechanical music features, for this reason why he was considered the first inventor of the mechanical music box. The Antoine Favre-Salomon discovery consisted of a small rotating cylinder made of a mixture of copper and zinc, with dots on the surface of the cylinder, which caused the up and down movements of the metal comb plates to be distilled to produce musical notes.
Six years later, Ishak Piguet made use of Favre’s invention and introduced the mechanics into jewelry, watches, cigarette boxes, wooden boxes, and precious metals.
In the 19th century, the music box construction was mostly concentrated in Switzerland, Geneva. After 1811, other music-making venues were established in Jura Vaudois, in Auberson and Sainte Croix, this contributed to the preservation of the tradition of watchmaking, which suffered after the Napoleonic wars.
The first music box factory in Sainte Croix was founded in 1814 by Charles Reuge, specifically producing pocket watches with mechanical music features. Sainte Croix has now become an industrial brand of mechanical music. Here all types of music boxes are still being produced.
In the beginning, a music box could have four, six or eight songs. In 1862, the Paillard company (Charles Paillard and Nicole brothers, who started the music box manufacturing industry) modified its mechanics, making it possible to replace cylinders and increase the number of songs. Also in the 19th century, craftsmen in Leipzig (Germany) designed a music box disk (metal plates) with a working principle such as replacing the cd player and users can choose favorite songs. This is the “ancestor” of the jukebox appearing later on.
Although 200 years have passed since the invention, the music box remains an object of beauty, with a touch of art and a sentimental sense that exists and is always regarded as pure gifts and gifts. People will assume that recorded music cannot replace the sound of live instruments. This is still an interesting phenomenon bringing scents to the past.
