A short history of the music box
A music box plays a tune by itself. Inside is a steel comb whose teeth are each tuned to a note, and a turning cylinder or disc with pins or holes that pluck the teeth in order. Wind it up or turn the crank and the melody comes out, bright and bell-like.
Before the comb: bells
The idea of music written as pins on a turning cylinder is very old. In medieval Europe, church towers used pinned cylinders to ring tunes on their bells automatically. The music box shrank that idea down to something you could hold in your hand.
1796: a watchmaker in Geneva
In 1796, the Geneva watchmaker Antoine Favre-Salomon replaced the bells with a comb of tuned steel teeth, plucked by a small pinned cylinder. It was tiny enough to fit inside a pocket watch, a seal, or a snuffbox, and Swiss watchmakers soon made it a craft of its own.
A Swiss industry
Through the 1800s, music boxes grew from trinkets into fine furniture, with longer cylinders, more teeth, and several tunes on each cylinder. Much of the work moved to the Jura mountain villages of western Switzerland, especially Sainte-Croix, where Reuge was founded in 1865 and still makes music boxes today. Makers learned to tune each tooth by grinding it and to add small lead weights under the lowest teeth so they could sound deep notes.
Discs, and a living-room boom
In the 1880s, makers in Leipzig, Germany, had a new idea: put the music on a flat metal disc with punched projections instead of a pinned cylinder. Symphonion started selling disc music boxes in 1885, followed by Polyphon, and one of Polyphon's founders went on to start Regina in the United States. Discs were cheap to make and easy to swap, so a family could buy a new song the way people later bought records. Large disc boxes played in parlors, hotels, and saloons, some of them coin-operated.
The phonograph takes over
Edison's phonograph of 1877, and the gramophone after it, could play real voices and whole orchestras. By the early 1900s recorded music had replaced the music box as home entertainment, and most of the big makers closed or turned to making player pianos and phonographs.
Small, sweet, and here to stay
The music box never disappeared. It became the small movement inside jewelry boxes, snow globes, and keepsakes, most often playing one short tune on 18 notes. Hand-crank boxes that read a punched paper strip let anyone write their own songs with a hole punch, which is exactly how Llamabox works.
Try one in your browser
Llamabox is a free music box you can write songs for. It has a 25-note comb covering two octaves with every sharp and flat. Punch holes in the paper, turn the crank, and share your song with a link.