A sign of the slow maturing of our hobby-plus-business is the increased
careful research into its early beginnings, only around 130 years ago.

Almost simultaneously, two long and serious articles have appeared
in the two principal British journals, the Pianola Journal (No 11) and
the Player-Piano Group Bulletin (No 151).  In the Pianola Journal,
in "Towards a History of the Aeolian Company", Rex Lawson begins to
sketch out what would be an early chapter in his master work on player
instruments, were he ever to have the time to complete one.

In the second, "John McTammany's 'History of the Player'" in the PPG
Bulletin, Julian Dyer has been looking in depth at the surviving
evidence for the activities of that much-self-publicised, much-maligned
pioneer of roll-playing instruments.

So far as the two pieces deal with the same period, they almost
completely agree.  McTammany was a genuine innovator, but suffered from
commercial takeover of his ideas by others.  Where he has been attacked,
it is for doing things, and claiming things, he didn't -- "inventor of
the player piano", for one.

They explain why plants of what later became two of the greatest rivals
in the player world, Aeolian and Wilcox & White, at one stage nestled
comfortably across the street from each other in Meriden CT, and even
used the same roll-making machinery, and what eventually happened to
the firm that actually made the phenomenally successful Mechanical
Orguinette rather than sold it, the Munro Organ Reed Company.

A second inventive client of MORC, Merritt Gally, shared patents with
them and McTammany who had cast in his lot with them was afraid of the
Mechanical Orguinette Company "nobbling" Gally for their own purposes.
In a patents dispute with Gally where MORC had him at a disadvantage,
a deal was struck which would enable MORC to proceed independently of
MOC.  Under McTammany's guidance, MORC went into competition with MOC
(by now, 1888, just about to become Aeolian Organ & Music) and launched
a new version of McTammany's Organette using rubberized cloth for the
pneumatics without testing it properly beforehand.

The rubber was improperly stabilized and after a year all their
production failed.  A sordid deal between Aeolian's tough and wily
president James Morgan and millionaire Horace Wilcox resulted in the
rivals feasting on the corpse of MORC; and John McTammany sank into
obscurity.

A vision of smelly beasts with yellow fangs lunching on each other is
inescapable when one reads these histories.  McTammany (figuratively --
he is said to have lost an arm in the Civil War) ended up as one severed
leg in the desert.  His virtue for us is that he wrote a lot of it down;
and in cool retrospect, he seems faithful to the truth.

Dan Wilson, London