the.com/music box
a tiny machine that bottles a song and pours it out one tooth at a time
means a small mechanical device that plays a tune automatically, usually when wound up or opened, by means of a rotating cylinder or disc that plucks the teeth of a metal comb.
from A plain compound of "music" and "box." "Music" travels back through Old French "musique" to Latin "musica" and ultimately Greek "mousike" — "the art of the Muses," the nine goddesses of song and poetry. "Box" comes from Old English "box," likely from Latin "buxus," the boxwood tree whose hard timber was carved into small containers. So the name simply marries the Muses to a little wooden case. The mechanism itself was developed by Swiss watchmakers around the turn of the 19th century, refining the tuned-comb-and-cylinder idea from earlier musical clockwork.
- mechanism
- Steel comb teeth plucked by a rotating pinned cylinder
- origin
- Born from Swiss watchmakers around 1796
- tuning
- Each comb tooth filed to one exact pitch
- scale
- Early cylinder players preceded the entire record industry
- physics
- Lower notes need longer, weighted teeth to vibrate
swiss music box — cylindrical mechanism with pins on a rotating drum, invented in geneva around 1796
ballerina music box — figurine pirouettes while playing, popularized victorian era, still manufactured by reuge in switzerland
tin drum music box — tin lithograph cylinder music box, mass-produced germany 1880s-1920s, highly collectible