Hi All,  As I mentioned earlier, the trackerbar was fairly easily
identified by a number of different people, so I began a minor quest
to gather more information about this unique and interesting player
system.  The best lead came from Dana Johnson, who provided me with
an article from Scientific American that was dated May 20, 1916, in
which the author provided a diagram and an explanation of how the
system works.

Finding the name of the inventor, Paul Brown Klugh, was the big lead
that led to a wealth of patent information at Google Patent Search.
Not only did I find the exact patent which describes the system in
great detail, I also found the numerous patents which preceded the
final version of the system.  Also, Mr. Klugh had to invent a roll
cutting machine to perforate the special rolls for his unique system.

For the time being I'm just going to send the information I've
gathered to Robbie so it can be added to the technical section of the
MMD Archives.  However, after I finish my current project about the
Pratt-Read air motor, I'll turn my attention to creating the new pages
about the Solo-Carola Inner Player.

One other interesting point to note is that the system was never
referred to as the 'Solo-Carola' in any of the patent information,
so it must have been named by Cable after the decision was made to put
it into production.  This leads one to wonder how they came to call it
the 'Solo-Carola'.

My thought is that the 'Solo' part was fairly simple, since each note
has the ability to play in the solo, or theme mode at will.  It's my
guess that the 'Carola' part is a combination of "Ca" from 'Cable',
"rol" from 'roll', and "a" to make the word sound feminine, or delicate,
and differentiate it from the obvious sounding word "Carol" or "Caroll".
Thus it became a unique word, with its own unique pronunciation, that
was pretty hard to mis-pronounce.  (Just my guess..)

Musically,
John A Tuttle
Player-Care.com
Brick, New Jersey, USA

 [ Thanks, John.  I received all the image files which I'll soon
 [ place at the MMD Tech page, http://www.mmdigest.com/Gallery/Tech 
 [ -- Robbie