Christian Greinacher has asked after details of singing bird pipes.
I have a large collection of books and magazines, in both English and
French, on this subject.  Not one goes into the technical details of
pipe making and voicing.

The closest is the book I often quote, and did a partial translation
online, "Les Automates," by Chapuis and Gellis (1927).  (Not to be
confused with the later 1958 Addendum by Chapuis and Droz.)  Even this
book gives only a schematic overview of the subject, with some rather
nice detailed line drawings.

Mary Hiller, the noted doll collecting enthusiast, wrote in one of her
books that it was hard to get details out of the makers.  This was in
the 1970s.  One maker was reputed to observe that there was no longer
any interest [as] they were trying to invent television [and] since
that was done what was the point!

Christian is lucky to live in these times.  By reading through these
doll collecting books and auction catalogs, one finds that this was
a somewhat insular industry.  There was (and in the novelty department)
still is a strong, intense feeling of competition.  Since anyone could
copy a patent, the idea was to keep a lot of this a trade secret.  Some
of this comes down to national pride, Japan vs. Swiss and German industry.
The windows of the Reuge factories in the late 1990s, with spectacular
views of the Alps, were blacked out lest someone steal how these things
are done.

The Wendel family of Siegfried and sons has done a lot to open this up
and literally scrape the paint off the window of their establishment.
On the same 1990s trip I was able to order from them several raw
movements that have been invaluable for study.  I was also able to
collect a number of caged birds for study.

Only after over a decade of attempts have I been able to fix the small
bellows on some of these birds.  While the leather covering is simple,
the valves must be perfect or the bellows will fail.  The Geoffrey
Mason book noted in another MMD post has a whole appendix on valves.

As for the pipes, any good book on physics will have a section on
resonance theory.  Most sources quote the Scientific American series
on the physics of musical instruments.  This will give one the theory.
Our local library in the 1960s had some books (Audsley, Lewis) on how
to make a pipe organ.  I copied these pages. Ironically it was all
there -- how to make pipes.  The tables of measurements I could not
understand at the time, as I was still in elementary school.

The practical was and is done by practice.  These tables evolved
through trial and error.  The only thing a pipe scale can give you is
a place to start.  Over the last 20 years eBay has been full of attempts
to make pipes for the Wurlitzer 105, exactly and preciously as
specified in the plans.

I made several dozen Caliola pipes before I had something I liked.
This was after I had help from a master.  Only then could I understand
the tables in the library books.  Since most of the masters preferred
to watch TV and yell at their idiot kids in the 1970s and 1980s, much
of this will need to be re-learned.

As for the bird pipes proper, these are basically calliope pipes.  The
angle of the mouth is between 180 and 270 degrees.  The cut up on these
is quite high as it almost equals the angle of the mouth.  Most of the
bird pipes I have, including the plastic injected molded ones, have
filing on the mouth.  This affects the voicing and probably is a good
part of the cost of these novelties.

The pipes are also probably made by die casting.  This is a complex art
of a craft in itself.  Given the angles on the upper lip, I can not see
how one could machine it.  The tube is easy to turn on a lathe.  The
mouth cut, but the lip is inset.

The windway is a plug, the same as in a simple reed whistle.  I suspect
many of the pipe voicers had grandfathers who carved whistles and then
did so themselves for their grandkids.

Last year I worked on a Whistler figure.  While the song was discernable,
the technology is more adapted to the tweeting of the bird itself.  The
auction house Christian Bailly wrote several good books on the subject.
These really opened up the access to, at least, the "who and when".

What I found surprising is almost all the birds play the same song.
This song was arranged in the latter part of the 18th century and
popularized in the early 19th.  The same song used for over 200 years!
Since Bailly had access to the Griesbaum archives through the Wendels,
it was noted that they could have changed the song, and did even have
prototypes with a different one.

The cams that play this song are clearly photographed in Chapuis and
Gellis (1928).  The MBSI was given permission to reprint this, and did
reprint the singing bird chapter in English in one of their publications.
(Some of the more technical parts were skipped over.)  I have a copy of
this, but it may be extraordinarily rare, as I have not seen it listed
online.

There is a whole large collection of ephemera, and magazines, printed
mostly by the English, Swiss, French and American clock and watch
societies.  As noted above, doll collecting societies also wrote about
singing birds and related automata.  Much of the information printed in
the 1950s is pure speculation and completely wrong.  The photographs, on
the other hand, are invaluable.

Note that a person would be lucky to see one example in a lifetime
[among] almost all these publications; now, with our newer communication
channels which have replaced the above magazines and newsletters, more
people can connect.

Julie Porter