Musical boxes

In 1796 in Geneva, the watchmaker Antoine Favre-Salomon delighted his customers with a ‘self-playing mechanical musical instrument’ housed in a small pewter box. Today, his invention is used in our musical boxes virtually unchanged: a key, a spring mechanism, a rotating metal cylinder with small pins on the outside that pluck each individual note of the composition on a comb with 18 steel tongues – just as it was over 200 years ago.