Dear MMD'ers,  A few days ago I posted an answer to a question about
Beethoven's "Wellington's Sieg".  In that posting I mentioned the
Metronome and its inventor, Mr. Winkel.

Diedrich Nikolaus Winkel (Lippstatt, Germany, 1773 - Amsterdam,
Netherlands, 1826) was an extraordinary craftsman and inventor,
but a lousy salesman.  He came to live in Amsterdam in 1800 as a
producer of some very fine mechanical musical instruments.  He will
be remembered by two inventions: the aforementioned Metronome and the
famous Componium.

In 1814 Winkel made the first usable metronome by adding two weights to
a pendulum: a bigger one below and a lighter slideable one on the other
side.  All other attempts before to make an audible time-measurer
stranded on the necessity of making pendulums of more than two meters
length for slow rhythms.

The original of the first metronome can be seen in the Municipal Museum
in The Hague, Netherlands, and it can be seen there that the modern
construction is still almost the same, albeit somewhat smaller in
dimensions.

The German inventor, instrument maker and music teacher Johann Nepomuk
Maelzel saw the Metronome in 1816.  He was a better salesman and may
have had more contacts in the musical field of those days.  He took the
invention and took patents on it in London and Paris; that's why the
machine still is depicted as "Maelzels Metronome" (M.M.)

The other important invention by Dirk Winkel is the Componium.  This
automatic organ is played by two separate barrels that are turning
around simultaneously.  The tunes on the barrels are arranged in such
a way that pieces of a few musical measures are played by one of the
barrels alternately.  In between, a rather complicated mechanism
decides which of the ten tunes of the other barrel will be played
for the next few measures, thus giving thousands of combinations like
a musical dice-game.  The Componium, in a rather bad shape now, is in
the collection of the Brussels Museum of Instruments.

Hans van Oost, Netherlands

 [ Winkel's metronome seems to include the time-keeping methods
 [ of both the pendulum clock and the balance-wheel clock.
 [ An marvelous machine, indeed!  -- Robbie