This is my second anecdote, to address the wonderful essay by TJ
Fisher.  He gives hope to the future for these fantastic instruments.
I do hope we are all supporting the art of cloning!  He reminds me of
myself as a young enthusiast (although he is much more sophisticated
as illustrated in his essay).

I was also lucky enough to live near W. Parker Lyon's Pony Express
Museum which housed a tremendous collection of 19th century memorabilia
as well as quite a number of nickelodeons.  I would save my nickels and
than ask my mother to drop me off and not come back until the museum
closed.  I could easily loose myself in the fantasy of the Old West.
It wasn't until much later that I found out that nickelodeons didn't
really belong to the 1890s as much as the first decades of the 1900s.

Later, as a So. Californian, we waited anxiously for Disneyland to open
as we had been seeing the treasures that were to be unveiled on July
22, 1955.  We paid our first visit three weeks after opening and I am
going to report my memory of the automatic musical instruments that
were found in the early years.

On Main street there was the Penny Arcade.  It housed at the entrance
a large and impressive Wurlitzer (Phillips) PianOrchestra.  The case
was beautifully finished in what was called "Silver Fox" -- black
with silver white rubbed into the oak grain.  This instrument had the
multi-roll changer, the first one I had ever seen.  As impressive as the
instrument was it never played well and one could only glimpse at what
it might sound like.  There was also a large and impressive Welte
orchestrion, beautiful but it also never played well.

That Welte orchestrion is still in the Penny Arcade (the last time
I was there) but the management had allowed a person that I would refer
to as a Charlatan to convert it to play by MIDI, which it does terribly,
and a continuous loop of paper has be jerry-rigged to replace the music
roll and it slips along very unconvincingly.  There was also a more
garden-variety nickelodeon in the Arcade.

 [ Don't blame the rebuilder -- he only followed Disneyland's orders.
 [ See the articles about "Welte Cottage Orchestrion at Disneyland",
 [ indexed at http://www.mmdigest.com/Archives/KWIC/D/disneyland.html 
 [ -- Robbie

Across the street in the Swift Meats General Store there was a side
room with a pot-bellied stove and five nickelodeons, some with pipes.
I remember one of them was called "Electrova".  In the Main Street
Movie there was another 10-tune nickelodeon playing constantly for
the movies.  That didn't last long.  In the Davy Crockett Store there
were several automatic instruments, one of them being a Regina Sublima.

On the dock for the Mark Twain steamboat there was a Wurlitzer
orchestrion with its famous 'Fascinator' light at the top.  In their
penchant to wash things down to squeaky clean every night they made
quick work of turning that machine into junk.

The carousel organ was a very beautiful Writer fully-chromatic organ
which I was told was from a skating rink but it to was never restored
and I don't believe it ever played.  Later when Fantasyland was
re-modeled I thought we finally had a playing band organ adjacent
to the Flying Dumbo ride as it was enclosed in glass and appeared to
be working with the music being shared by Dumbo and the carousel.
I was disappointed to find it nothing but show.  At least they do use
recorded band organ music with very nice arrangements of Disney tunes.

After high school I went to Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles
which was very closely allied with Walt Disney.  I had the good fortune
of meeting and speaking with him several times, but our conversation
always revolved around trains.  Kelly Kimball, the daughter of Ward
Kimball, was also at Chouinard at the time and I frequently went to
their home where Ward had his own private narrow-gauge railroad, a big
influence on Walt.

In the ninety's I found myself working for Walt Disney Imagineering
and had hopes of being able to get to the bottom of their philosophy
regarding automatic musical Instruments.  I was sent down to Disney
World several times to work with the SQS (Show Quality Standards)
people.

I went to see Big Bertha one morning for breakfast and asked them if
they would play the orchestrion for me.  I am sorry I did; it sounded
so terrible that it was unimaginable.  When I investigated I found that
they had packed carpet behind it to dampen the sound and a piece of the
carpet had gotten into the mechanism, further damaging the playing.

I also had an opportunity to visit backstage and see their collection
of automatic musical instruments and it was fairly extensive.  When
I asked why they were not on location, I was told that they were more
trouble than they were worth and that the merchandisers of fuzzy toys
and tee-shirts needed every square inch of space available.  While at
Disney World I did see the big Wurlitzer PianOrchestra which was
shipped from Disneyland but it still didn't play well at all.

One final note about Disney's automatic musical instruments.  A friend
of mine who does contract work for Disney happened very fortunately
to be at their Glendale warehouse when they were literally dumping a
Tangley Calliaphone which he picked up for _free_.  Some luck, huh!

Nobody's going to read all of the above but I thank MMD for the
fantastic resource it is.

Cecil Dover