Darrell Clarke said, "The tracker mechanism is vital for roll
preservation as well as precise playing."

I've seen a number of early 88-note instruments without automatic
tracking, but they all had some kind of hand tracker.  To judge from
Weber pedal player grands and the 65/88n Aeolian pushups, which tended
to fit the same improvements at the same time, hand tracking was fitted
as standard until about mid-1910.

This consisted of a 4-inch grab lever at the right of the spoolbox,
connected to a cam bearing on the right- hand end of the drive spindle,
which you flicked up for "right" and down for "left".  In practice this
only had to be done at the start of a roll: once in track, always in
track.

However, the public are not the same animal as the player enthusiast
and obviously there were complaints of poor tracking and damage to rolls.
Single-finger or single-ear tracking began to be fitted as an option.
This had a second pneumatic driven from the Play/Reroll valve box which
lifted off a notched locking bar normally immobilizing the tracking on
reroll.

The bolt-on nature of this device is very obvious as it is often screwed
down on top of patent date labels on the top of the stack.  It has the
great virtue that the ear mounting was only loosely fixed and had a small
lever for adjusting to suit the roll - very useful for Aeolian-American
rolls of the 1960s which have the notes cut too far right.  (Post-1950
QRS aren't quite right, either.)

This arrangement seems to have become standard in 1912.  It requires a
delicate balance between the left-hand spindle spring and the pneumatic
and as soon as the lubrication of the left-hand spindle has dried up,
it stops working.  Double-ear tracking, where the ear mountings are not
provided with tweak levers and the roll is positioned by suction in
both directions, became standard c.1914 and remained so until Aeolian
bought into Standard's four-hole system in about 1925.

I've often wondered about the fishing-reel tracker, which I've seen
in Australia.  It is both amazing to watch and mechanically very clever
since (as far as I recall) it centralizes both wide and narrow rolls.
Can anyone tell us the story about the invention of this ?

Dan Wilson