![]() ![]() ![]() The Pianola was fiercely marketed by the Aeolian Company and it was because of this aggressive campaign that the Pianola had a short lived but large popularity. It was known as a cabinet-style player and consisted of pedals or "exhausters" in which the performer would work with their feet, "a paper-roll transporting device which fed the perforated music over a tracker board containing small wind ways leading to a set of pneumatic valves, and a row of small fingers at the back of the player which rested on the piano keyboard" (Ord-Hume 33). ![]() It was, in fact, a completely separate appliance which was used in conjunction with an ordinary piano(Ord-Hume 33). In 1897 a man named Edwin Votey perfected the Pianola piano-player, which like the Pianista was a separate player that could "make any piano into an automatically-played instrument. This device was called the Pianista and was literally a piano playing another piano (Roehl 2). The first player was constructed on pneumatic principles by pumping a hand crank in which a vacuum powered a set of metal fingers to play the keyboard of an ordinary piano. ![]() Cover of the first Aeolian Company Pianola Catalog, New York, 1898.According to Player Piano Treasury by Harvey Roehl, the first man to construct a piano to play itself through mechanical means was, Fourneaux, a Frenchman who patented the player in 1863. ![]()
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