J.P. Seeburg was the first manufacturer in America to use scenic
art glass panels illuminated from the inside in coin-operated pianos.
While pioneering the A-roll coin piano at the Marquette Piano Co.,
he stated that he thought many other brands of coin pianos were
generally unattractive, with the piano action, music roll mechanisms,
etc. visible through plain glass windows.  In early 1906 he enrolled
in a design class at Chicago's well-known Art Institute.

In 1909 Seeburg left Marquette to manufacture his own coin pianos.
A press release announcing his new Art Style C piano in an early 1910
Music Trade Review stated

  "Mr. Seeburg has grasped the fact that there are restaurants,
  buffets, and moving picture shows, and a there is a demand among
  a certain class of trade for a more artistic instrument than has yet
  been provided.  The new Art Style with its mission finish, electric
  lamps at either end of the keyboard, and Tiffany art glass panels in
  which are depicted a "Lohengrin" scene, is bound to satisfy a desire
  which has long existed for an instrument calculated to get away from
  the associations too often suggested by a coin controlled piano."

While his engineers Oscar Nelson and Peter Wiggen were busy designing
and patenting the mechanisms used in early style Seeburg pianos,
J.P. Seeburg was applying for his own design patents for his
artistically-designed cabinets.  These were granted for Seeburg Styles
F, K, L Orchestra, H, and J between 1912 and 1914.  Art glass designs
weren't included in the cabinet design patents because he wanted the
flexibility of using a variety of glass designs in each model.

As stated by Q. David Bowers in the forthcoming Reblitz/Bowers book
on American coin pianos and orchestrions,

  "While certain other coin-operated pianos, foreign and domestic,
  had colored glass panels, the Art Style C, with a graceful swan
  motif from Lohengrin, is believed to have been the first with scenic
  opalescent glass."

(Our new book is currently waiting in line for layout after Dave's
books on disc music boxes and tabletop organettes are published.)

Drehobl Bros. Art Glass in Chicago began making all of Seeburg's art
glass windows around 1920.  In their heyday they employed 40 glass
artists, with Seeburg being their biggest customer.  The company still
had a few original unsold Seeburg art glass windows in stock in the
1970s, which Marshall Seeburg had never picked up when the coin piano
business floundered in 1929.  Most of these were sold to Chicago-area
restorers by the 1980s.  The company also occasionally repaired
orchestrion art glass for collectors during that era.

When remaining family members sold the business, I was able to acquire
many original patterns for Seeburg and other Chicago-area coin pianos,
several boxes of brass stampings for piano art glass, and full-size
drawings of piano art glass that they had made in the collecting era.

Art Reblitz
Colorado Springs, Colorado
http://www.reblitzrestorations.com/