Hurrah for the MMD subscribers. The responses about the coin-op Wurlitzer
harps are perfect. It's all there. History, models, etc.

I want to note that my forthcoming book, Let The Other Guy Play It (Royal
Bell Books, April 1998), will reproduce the original catalog pages for
both Model A and Model B harps, as well as a location photograph showing
a Model A in a bar.

The Wurlitzer harps had two problems: the law, and the weak sound.
Wurlitzer spent classical money to get the laws changed across America.
It happened in at least three or four major cities.  For instance, in San
Francisco, around 1905 the city council passed a law outlawing all music
from bars and bordellos.  Once passed, two weeks later they passed a law
saying the only allowable music was a coin-operated harp.

Guess who?  Only Wurlitzer had them. The San Francisco papers said that
the saloon keepers quickly stumbled all over themselves to contact a
representative of "...a Cincinnati music machine company."  Guess who
again?  That was the home office of Wurlitzer.  They had "iced" the whole
country.

But they didn't have the product!  The problem with the harp is that you
couldn't hear it over the din of a bar.  Even today, as beautiful as it
sounds, you'd better be in a quiet room and very close to the machine.

So in barely a year, the harps were in, then tossed out, and the
lawmakers across the country had to re-write their acceptance rulings in
order to set up an area of graft they had literally killed when they went
for the Wurlitzer "suggestions."  Fortunately for Wurlitzer, their pianos
were included.  But so were everybody else's.  It opened up the market to
more pianos, and the orchestrions to follow.

There's a lot more to this music than the music alone.  This mechanical
music history stuff -- it's GREAT!

Dick Bueschel