I received this e-mail request today:

> I have to do a report on the player piano, and so I looked up
> your web site.  I was wondering if you could give me the
> information of what year and by who was the player piano invented?
> This could help me a lot.  Thanks for your time,
>
> Heather

Dear Heather,  Your request is a fine excuse for me to find the answer
for both of us.  Here is a short report about the player piano and the
music roll.

My best source is "Player Piano Treasury", (C) 1961 by Harvey Roehl,
publ. by Vestal Press, Vestal NY.  You can read more extracts from this
book at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~pianola/rollhist.htm .

I found the text on Jacquard at
  http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~ped/teachadmin/histsci/htmlform/lect4.html

 - - -

The question, "who invented the player piano?" is like "who invented
the automobile?"  There just isn't any clear-cut answer, for as in
the case of the auto, the credit must be divided among a number of
pioneers in the field;  undoubtedly many similar ideas were conceived
independently by different individuals at about the same times.

But we do know that in 1863 a Frenchman named Forneaux patented
what appears to be the first player operating on pneumatic principles,
instead of purely mechanical means like the music box.  This he
called the "Pianista", and it formed the basis of practically all later
developments in the field.  The Pianista was first exhibited in America
at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876.

As shown in the attached drawing, Forneaux's Pianista was taller than
the piano it played!  A hand crank operated the exhauster bellows to
produce the suction for operating the machine.  Above the crank were
four levels of smaller bellows, nowadays called "pneumatics", which
moved the finger levers to push down on the piano keys.  The hand crank
also turned, via a worm and gear, a cylinder of perhaps five inches
diameter, which had metal or wooden pins in it like the cylinder of
a music box.  The projecting pins would have moved levers which
controlled the key-pushing pneumatics.

Forneaux's primitive machine, now called a push-up player, was refined
by related inventions for player reed organs, and by the 1890s push-up
players operating from a punched paper music roll were offered to the
public.  They were popular for a few years, from about 1900 to 1905,
but they were, nevertheless, clumsy contraptions -- clumsy to move up
to the piano keyboard (great care was necessary so that the wooden
fingers wouldn't be broken), and a nuisance to move away when it was
time for little Suzie to practice her piano lesson.

Once moved away from the piano it was likely to stay in the corner,
forgotten.  So it is not surprising that very early in the game,
efforts were made to eliminate the player as a separate unit and to
build its features directly into the piano itself.

The Aeolian Company of New York marketed its early push-up player and
the later player piano so successfully that the brand name, "Pianola",
a registered trade mark, became a generic term applied to all makes
of player pianos, much in the manner of "Cellophane" or "Victrola"
or "Hoover" in later years.

The paper music roll with holes punched in it derives from the punched
cards used to control the automatic weaving loom.  Joseph-Marie
Jacquard (1752-1834) made a machine which wove the fabric patterns
according to the pattern of holes punched in a pasteboard card.  Each
card contained the same number of rows and columns, the presence or
absence of a hole was detected mechanically and used to determine the
actions of the loom.

It wasn't long before the individual punched cards were carefully taped
together and laid into a stack -- the predecessor of "Z-fold" computer
paper!  From this "book" the Jacquard loom was able to weave (and
reproduce) patterns of great complexity, e.g. a surviving example is a
black and white silk portrait of Jacquard woven under the control of a
10,000 card "stored program".

Jacquard's invention of the punched card is now recognized as
important largely because of the influence it had on other developers
of computing machinery.  Of particular interest at the time was the
strange concept of "inverted logic": that the absence of something --
the hole in the card -- could be a command to _do_ something.

Robbie Rhodes

 [ Exactly eight minutes after I sent the message Heather replied with
 [ a thank-you note: "That helped me so much.  I had tried about 3 or 4
 [ inventions to do my report on, and I couldn't get enough information
 [ on any of them."   -- Robbie