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ANSWER: Music boxes come in all shapes and sizes, from the tiny ones inside jewelry boxes to the gigantic band organs found on old carousels. I believe the type you’re speaking of are the ones produced for home use.
By definition, a music box is an automatic musical instrument in a box that produces musical notes by using a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc to pluck the tuned teeth, called lamellae, of a steel comb.
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The typical table music box had six interchangeable cylinders. It could have been any size from that of a hat box to a large piece of furniture, but most were tabletop models. Artisan clockmakers produced clockwork mechanisms to power them. For most of the 19th century, Switzerland was home to the majority of music box makers. Jérémie Recordon and Samuel Junod opened the first music box factory there in 1815. There were also a few manufacturers in Bohemia and Germany. By the end of the 19th century, some of the European makers had opened factories in the United States.
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But the cylinder music box was, at best, a cumber-some device, and expensive. From the beginnings of today's music box technology, the music box underwent a progressive improvement in Germany and later in the United States.
In 1870, a new type of music box appeared in Germany that played changeable flat discs instead of cylinders. Invented almost simultaneously in London by Ellis Parrand and in Leipzig by Paul Lochmann, it revolutionized devices that played music. The worldwide center of the industry was in Leipzig and Berlin. In the last decades of the 19th century, however, mass-produced models, such as the Polyphon, made use of interchangeable metal disks instead of cylinders. The cylinder-based machines rapidly lost popularity. By 1895 more than 3,000 people were employed in Leipzig, and exports from there went to many parts of the world.
The term "music box" also applied to clockwork devices which had a removable metal disk or cylinder that was only used to program them without producing the sounds directly by means of pins and a comb. Instead, the cylinder or disk worked by activating bellows and levers which fed and opened pneumatic valves which, in turn, activated a modified wind instrument or plucked the chords on a modified string instrument. The Orchestrion could do both at the same time, essentially combining a music box with a player piano.
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One of the earliest music boxes to be sold in America was called the Symphonion. It employed steel discs, had a patented fly wheel, speed regulator, side dampers, and double comb arrangement. One winding would allow it to play for 30 minutes. The Symphonion won awards at shows in Chicago in 1893 and Antwerp, Belgium in 1894. Prices ranged, depending on the degree of sophistication, from $4 all the way up to $300.
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At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, most music boxes were gradually replaced by player pianos, which were louder and more versatile and melodious, when kept tuned, and by the smaller gramophones which had the advantage of playing back voices. Escalating labor costs increased the price and further reduced volume.
But the invention of the phonograph, the First World War, and the economic crisis in the 1920s made the luxury music box completely disappear.
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