Sorry for late response here -- a mouse (warm furry type) ate off
an inch of my modem cord !

 [ You must set out more food!  ;)  -- Robbie

Robbie said [in MMD 990108]:

 [ D. L. Bullock was speaking about the player piano, with the
 [ mechanism built inside, and this was pretty rare in the Gay
 [ Nineties.  It's more likely that your old rolls were made for
 [ a reed organ, or perhaps a push-up player.  Bowers' Encyclopedia,
 [ page 255, notes that Wilcox-White sold a combination reed organ
 [ and player piano (built-in) in 1892.  However, "Although inner
 [ players or player pianos, as they came to be called universally,
 [ were made earlier ... the popularization of the piano with built-in
 [ mechanisms began shortly after 1900."

I must have seen at least three Pianotists in Mary Belton's "Original
Pianola Shop" in Brighton during the early 1970s.  These were a barrel
piano made, I would judge from the positively horrible uprights they
were based on, in very large quantity between about 1897 and 1903.

In an encyclopaedia dated 1895, in the former Benet Meakin collection,
there is an immensely long article with photographs of Melville Clark's
experimental 65-note piano finished in that same year.  It had large
pouch pneumatics familiar in the later Wilcox and White Angelus
players.

Nothing commercial came of this until 1901 when Clark also introduced
the first 88-note piano: the Apollo which played wide rolls.  One
imagines he was trying to raise capital.  1901 was also the date
usually quoted in publicity by the Aeolian Co. as the birth of their
Pianola Piano.  Hupfeld's first built-in player was launched about then
too -- they'd had a very good pushup since 1898.

Somebody can correct me, but wasn't the great technical stumbling block
in player piano development the production of enough pneumatic power
inside the case to play a piano convincingly ?

Dan Wilson, London

 [ A good question!  I'd simply assumed that the market was slow to
 [ develop.  What are the technical improvements to Votey's design
 [ which enabled low-cost production and/or greater power?  -- Robbie