# Music box > A pinned cylinder plucking a steel comb - Date: c. 1770 - Era: Industrial age - Domain: [Textiles & Everyday Life](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/everyday/) - Rebuild stage: IV (Science & industry) - Difficulty: 4/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/music-box/ A music box plays a tune by itself: a brass cylinder set with fine steel pins turns slowly and plucks the tuned teeth of a steel comb, driven by a clock spring and held to an even speed by a small air brake. The positions of the pins encode the tune. The oldest dated example is a watch by Michel-Joseph Ransonnet of Nancy, its case dated 1772, in which a pinned barrel plucks six steel teeth through sprung levers. In 1796 the Geneva watchmaker Antoine Favre made a carillon whose pins caught steel blades, without bells or hammers. ![Music box · A pinned cylinder plucking a steel comb](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.CA0mjsjW_1MaqR5.webp) ## Legend 1. Pinned brass cylinder 2. Steel comb 3. Bass tooth with its lead weight 4. Damper under the tip 5. Spring barrel 6. Governor fan on its endless screw ## What it is ![A nineteenth-century music box in a wooden case, its lid open, the cylinder and comb visible under an inner glass lid, with a winding lever at the side](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.CDZikDie_VM7tq.webp) _A cylinder music box in its case, the movement under a glass cover._ A cylinder music box is a small automatic instrument. Its working parts sit on a metal bedplate: a brass cylinder lying on its side, a steel comb screwed down in front of it, a spring motor at one end and a speed regulator at the other, both taken from the [clock](/en/inventions/mechanical-clock/). The comb is a single plate of hardened steel cut into a row of teeth, each tuned to a note. The cylinder carries a great many fine steel pins, set so that as it turns they catch the teeth one after another and play a tune. The first movements were tiny and were fitted into watches, clocks, snuffboxes and sewing boxes. From about 1815 the music box became an instrument in its own right, usually a wooden case holding the movement under a glass lid. One cylinder could carry several tunes: at the end of each tune, a cam called the snail shifts it slightly sideways, so that a different set of pins lines up with the teeth. ## How it works Each tooth is a small steel bar fixed at its root and free at its tip, like one prong of a [tuning fork](/en/inventions/tuning-fork/). A pin on the turning cylinder catches the tip, lifts it and then lets it slip off. The tooth springs back and vibrates at its own frequency. The note depends on the length and thickness of the tooth: a longer or thinner tooth vibrates more slowly and sounds lower. The deepest notes would need teeth too long for the comb, so small lead weights are attached under the bass teeth to slow them down. ![Two teeth from the same comb rising from one small block that lies on a scrap of cloth: a short treble tooth and a longer bass tooth with a small lead weight attached underneath near its tip](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.7BNIFCfX_Z2vMnac.webp) _A short treble tooth and a long bass tooth weighted with lead._ The comb is screwed firmly to the bedplate, and the vibration passes through it to the case, which radiates the sound. A tooth that is still ringing when the next pin reaches it would buzz against the pin. A fine wire or a sliver of quill under the tip, the damper, stops the tooth before the pin plucks it again. The cylinder is a thin brass tube, about 0.5 mm thick. Its tapered pins are driven tightly through the wall and held in place with cement. Their positions are the score: the place of a pin along the cylinder chooses the tooth, and its place around the cylinder chooses the moment. A coiled steel mainspring in a barrel drives the cylinder through a train of gears. The same train turns, much faster, a worm called the endless screw, which carries a small fan. The air resists the fan more and more as it speeds up, and this keeps the tune at a steady tempo. ## How to do it The principle can be heard with a few simple parts. Clamp three thin strips of spring steel, such as cheap flexible steel rulers, under a hardwood block screwed to a board, so that they stick out by different lengths, say 6, 8 and 10 cm. Pluck each tip: the shortest gives the highest note. Sliding a strip in or out tunes it. ![A horizontal wooden roller with a crank, carried by two supports and set with small pins; in front of it, three steel strips of different free lengths clamped under a stepped block, their tips within reach of the pins](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.LeZJrlP7_ZYKjrC.webp) _A hand-turned roller with pins plucks three clamped steel strips._ For the cylinder, take a hardwood dowel about 3 cm thick and as long as the row of strips is wide. Mark a line around the dowel opposite each strip, and drive short brass pins into these lines, leaving 2 or 3 mm standing; a pin for the first strip, then one for the second a little further round, and so on, makes a simple rising phrase. Mount the dowel in two holes in upright supports so that the pins just catch the tips of the strips, fit a crank to one end and turn it slowly. The pins pluck the strips in the order you set them, as the cylinder of a music box does. **Safety.** Clamp the strips tightly: a strip that slips can spring out. Wear safety glasses while plucking and adjusting, and file or tape the corners of the strips. Wear gloves when driving the pins. Never open or adjust a real music box with the spring wound: if the governor slips, the spring unwinds in an instant, a "run" that spins the cylinder at great speed and breaks pins and teeth. ## History and evolution Pinned cylinders are much older than the music box. Since the late Middle Ages, automatic carillons in church towers had played tunes from large iron cylinders, later of brass, whose pins tripped levers connected to the hammers of the bells. In the Low Countries the pins could be moved to set new tunes, and almost every large church tower there still has one. The same pinned drum, on a smaller scale, drove the bells of chamber clocks. Tuned steel teeth first replaced bells in France. In 1769, according to the auction house Antiquorum, Michel-Joseph Ransonnet, a watchmaker of Nancy, presented a mechanism in which a pinned cylinder set small blades vibrating in place of bells. The historian Arthur Ord-Hume examined one of his watches, now in the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva, whose case is dated Paris 1772: its pinned barrel works sprung levers, and the levers pluck a comb of six steel teeth. In 1796 Antoine Favre, a watchmaker of Geneva, made a "carillon without hammers or bells". In place of the bells he used five steel blades that sounded when the pins of a cylinder caught them. The sound was poor at first, and makers added more blades. Early combs were built up from separate sections of one to five teeth; later combs were cut from a single plate of steel. Geneva made the boxes first; around 1815 the trade separated from watchmaking. The historian Daniel Troquet estimates that Geneva produced 13,000 boxes around 1860, with more than 1,000 people at work. After the watchmaking crisis of that year, the craftsmen of Sainte-Croix in the Jura turned to music boxes, and their first factories opened around 1875. Movements whose owner could change the cylinder date from the 1850s or 1860s: the collector John Clark dated the first, by Ducommun-Girod of Geneva, to 1854, while the Chimei Museum credits Paillard of Sainte-Croix with the interchangeable cylinder in 1862. Patents show that simple, reliable changing systems came into use only in the 1880s. In the 1890s, boxes playing metal discs, made in Leipzig, took the market. A disc was cheaper and easier to change than a pinned cylinder, so the repertoire could grow. Their success ended around 1910 with the gramophone and the radio. After the Second World War, Japanese makers invested in mass production and prices fell. By the end of the twentieth century, Japan made 55 to 60 million movements a year and China about 30 million, while the luxury makers of Sainte-Croix and Yverdon made about 3 million. ## Key facts - Oldest dated example: Watch by Michel-Joseph Ransonnet of Nancy, case dated Paris 1772: six steel teeth - Antoine Favre, Geneva, 1796: A carillon without hammers or bells, with five steel blades - Geneva production around 1860: An estimated 13,000 pieces, more than 1,000 workers - Wall of the cylinder: Brass about 0.5 mm thick ## Requires - [Steel](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steel/): Iron with just enough carbon (c. 1,000 BCE) - [Mechanical Clock](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/mechanical-clock/): Time cut into equal beats (c. 1300) - [Lead Smelting](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lead-smelting/): Lead from galena, and the silver hidden in it (c. 4,200 BCE) ## Sources - [France: birthplace of the musical comb, The Music Box 20 (7), pp. 218-220](https://mbsgb.org.uk/TMB/V20_B7.pdf), Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume, Musical Box Society of Great Britain (2002) - [Isaac Daniel Piguet, musical pendant with automaton, c. 1800 (lot 467, catalogue note on Ransonnet)](https://catalog.antiquorum.swiss/en/lots/lot-36-467), Antiquorum, Geneva (2003) - [The Music Box 3 (7): cylinder musical boxes playing long tunes, and interchangeable cylinders](https://www.mbsgb.org.uk/TMB/V3_B7.pdf), Musical Box Society of Great Britain (1968) - [Cylinder music box, c. 1890 (collection note on Paillard and Sainte-Croix)](https://collections.culture.tw/chimei_collectionsweb/en/collection.aspx?GID=MEM60EMB), Chimei Museum, Tainan - [Boîtes à musique (Daniel Troquet, 1997, revised 2009)](https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/013978/), Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse - [Musical boxes](https://www.museumspeelklok.nl/en/musical-boxes/), Museum Speelklok, Utrecht - [Music Box And Key](https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18416829/), Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum - [Glossary: comb, tooth, tuning weights, damper, cylinder, sectional comb, snail, endless screw, run](https://mbsi.org/glossary_terms/tuning-weights/), Musical Box Society International - [From Carillon to IBM: the musical roots of information technology (Jan Koster, 2003)](https://www.let.rug.nl/koster/musicbox/musicbox3.htm), University of Groningen Fact-checked on 2026-10-19. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/music-box/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.