John Kleinbauer's post reminded me to ask this general question:
How many hand-cranked or spring-wound instruments used a rotary fan
(rather than a positive-displacement bellows or pistons) to blow the
pipes or reeds?

Having worked on an orchestral organ music box, it seems to me that
using a high-speed fan blower in such a box would make a lot more
efficient use of spring power than cranking bellows off the governor
shaft, while wasting most of the power in spinning a volant compensee'
governor, whose blades simply fan the air to cool off the person who
had to wind up the box.  :-)

In fact, a centrifugal fan blower, driven through step-up gearing,
would have served as a governor in the bargain!  Has anyone ever seen
a spring or weight driven instrument with a fan blower?

A similar argument applies to organettes and monkey organs.  Fan
blowers are very tolerant of leakage and lots of stops and notes being
played -- in fact, the more air goes through them, the better they
produce (up to a point, of course).

I can understand that the high speed gearing and close tolerances might
have scared off the Swiss makers, who at least were familiar with
bellows.  But they already had the governor gearing, and close
tolerances were the name of the music box game.

Anyway, I too bought one of those crank church toys on eBay.  Price
almost the same, mine is in near mint condition, and is made by Chein,
of PianoLodeon and Rollmonica fame!  I wasn't too disappointed, since
I remembered such a toy from my childhood.  I wish it played more
chords, but it does a C-G-F-C sequence.  Actually, the chords are very
nicely voiced and perfectly tuned (in a Chein product?!?) and quite
"expressive" over a wide volume range depending how fast you crank.

My chords seem to be tuned in just intonation, rather than the tempered
scale, leading me to think there is a separate group of reeds for each
chord.  Is that right, John?

Mike Knudsen