The Story of the Music Box

The music box, the first successful device that could play a musical tune, was probably invented in Switzerland around 1770. Early music boxes were designed to play music using flat metal prongs that were plucked by a revolving metal cylinder. Eventually music box makers developed a flat disc to play the music. Commercial music boxes were gradually replaced by player pianos and phonographs by the early 20th Century. In 1952, Emory Cook recorded an album of music made by American and European music boxes from the George and Madeleine Brown collection. Using his skill as an audio engineer, Cook was able to record a fuller sound frequency than had previously been available in sound recordings. The recording accompanied Brown’s book of the same name.