HI folks,  I've run into Link Trainers a few times over the last few
years.  It's always fun to see the connections between various modern
objects and items from the heyday of mechanical music.

The first time I saw one was in a museum in Binghamton, New York, and
Harvey Roehl told me all about it and its history.  The last time I saw
one was during a re-union tour of the Engineering School at Syracuse
University, my alma mater.

In the aeronautics lab in the Engineering building there was a Link
trainer sitting right next to their modern flight simulator.  After
the tour guide gave us the presentation about their flight simulator,
the guide mentioned the Link trainer.  Of course, the guide knew very
little about it so I got the chance to fill in the details and the
history.  The guide had no idea of how it came about or what it was
made from.

Years ago, when I worked at Xerox, I was on the patent review board.
Several times I had to turn down a patent application for some
mechanical device because it had been patented or disclosed years
ago as part of a mechanical music machine.  The most note-worthy was
a method of centering a belt using a process basically identical to
the roll tracker on a player piano.

Craig Smith