OCR Text |
Show IN A HAND ORGAN FACTORY. "A hand organ is just like any church organ, with a few points of difference. It has bellows and pipes and keys. When you want to play on a church organ, you depress the keys, when you play a hand organ, you elevate them. You use your fingers on the keys of the big organ; but these little brass pins are the fingers that operate the hand organ. Here is one of the cylinders for an ordinary sized organ. It is fifteen inches long and five inches in diameter. It is, you see, first covered with a sheet of clean, stiff paper, and then is stuck full of little brass pins. Some of them, you will notice, are no more than tiny brass pegs, while others are nearly half an inch long, with a pin at each end, thus. The barrel is put in the organ and connected with the crank. When it is turned the brass pins are brought against the keys and the keys are raised. If it is one of the small ones, it raises the key only for an instant, and makes a short note. If it is one of the half inch ones, it makes a long note. It is very simple, you see, when it is explained. When the cylinder is marked for the tunes, it is easy enough to drive in the pins as you say, but it is not an easy matter to mark the tunes on the cylinder. I have the honor (as well as the profit, if there be any) of being one of the three men in America who can mark an organ barrel for the tunes. The gentleman who imports organs from Italy is another, and there is one more. I will show you how it is done. But you must promise me that you won't go off and make a hand organ as soon as I show you how." The promise was given without mental reservation [unreadable] properly prepared for "marking," he explained, "by being smoothly covered with a piece of tough paper. I hang it in position in the organ directly under the keys. Suppose I wan to mark it for ‘The Mulligan Guards.' A man with a steady hand turns the crank and I play the tune on the keys, pushing each key down upon the cylinder instead of raising it up. They do not, of course, make any sound, but they make a slight impression upon the paper wherever the key strikes. By long practice a tune can be played mutely in this way as well as if the player heard the sounds. When it is all marked off I take out the cylinder, and go carefully over all the indentations with a pen, and there is the tune. When the tunes are all marked, a skillful workman puts in the pegs, as you call them, and the barrel is completed. Every organ plays from seven to ten tunes. This one here plays nine. you see those little grooves at the end of the cylinder? When the grinder wants to change the tune he lifts a spring that keeps the cylinder in place and shoves it along a groove. Each groove controls one of the tunes. A man can put in about three tunes a day." "The cost? It all depends. Do you see that big fellow in the corner? That is a saloon organ, and belongs to Houston street. They got tired of the old tunes and want a new set. I made that organ five years ago and got $2,200 for it. Prices have come down about ten per cent since then, and I could make the same organ now for a trifle less than $2,000. It is just as good to day as when it was made. In the ordinary barrel organs we charge $5 a tune for putting in new tunes. And we have had a great deal of changing to do in the last year, getting rid of the "Pinafore" airs. There was a great run on them at one time, but they are no use now and have to come out. A common organ weighs about twenty five pounds, and is worth, to make, from $100 to $125, according to the number of tunes it plays. A parlor organ, with from twenty-five to forty-six keys, costs from $150 to $200. What we call a ‘side show organ' to imitate a brass band, has sixty keys, thirty-five brass trumpets, large and small drums, and triangles, and generally plays nine tunes. It is worth $2,500."-New York Times. |