ABSTRACT
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a great flurry of activity in the development of automatically played musical instruments. John McTammany was an inventor and musical instrument maker who made significant contributions to self- playing instrument technology. In 1868 he produced the first fully pneumatic player mechanism for reed organs utilizing a perforated-paper roll, an improvement over the earlier "Pianista" of NAPOLON FOURNEAUX. The Pianista was a large mechanism that employed a combination of power pneumatics and a pinned barrel that read from perforated cardboard cards. McTammany's improvements on his earlier device culminated in a PATENT of 1876, which placed the completely pneumatic mechanism inside the CASE of the instrument and provided for it to be driven by treadles, in contrast to Fourneaux's invention, which was housed in a separate case and acted on the KEYS of the piano from the exterior while a crank was turned.
