John McTammany

Biography

John McTammany is credited with constructing, about 1868, a mechanism for the automatic playing of organs that substituted Fourneaux's hand crank and perforated cardboard with a foot-pedal action and narrow sheets of perforated flexible paper wound and rewound on rollers. For this invention he filed a patent caveat on September 7, 1876, describing an improved attachment allowing any piece of music to be played automatically in any key, worked by a fan driven from the bellows and by a perforated paper strip, with a transposing mechanism. The author quotes the caveat's clumsy legal language as evidence of how undeveloped player-piano patent phrasing was at the time. Unlike Fourneaux's externally attached pianista, McTammany's action was built inside the organ case itself; while broadly pneumatic, it did not yet provide an individual pneumatic for each tone. A portrait of McTammany accompanies the text.

Highlights

• About 1868 constructed a mechanism for automatically playing organs, replacing Fourneaux's crank and cardboard with a foot-pedal action and narrow perforated paper rolls
• Filed a patent caveat on September 7, 1876 for an organ attachment able to play music automatically and transpose it into any key
• His player action was built inside the organ case rather than attached externally, as Fourneaux's had been

Source

Alfred Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers, Vol. I (1911), pp. 134, 135, 136, 137.

Public domain.