I bumped into this item sideways. I was looking at a peculiar early typewriter designed by Wheatstone. Since I’m addicted to Wheatstone I tried to animate it, but it was poorly described and pictured. The article noted that it was built by a Mr Pickler, so I started looking in that direction for more info. Turned out to be Pichler.
Francis Pichler ran the manufacturing end of the Wheatstone musical instrument company before Wheatstone shifted from music to telegraphs. In the 1850s Pichler became a major maker of harmoniums, which were basically giant harmonicas. A pedaled or cranked pump filled an air reservoir, and the keys valved air to a set of reeds, looking much like enlarged harmonica reeds.
Pichler was also an inventor and an acoustical experimenter. One of his experiments was a Magic Lantern display resembling a modern oscilloscope.
I wrote a long series on the Magic Lantern as a spiritual counterforce to modern genocidal science, showing how science began as ENTERTAINMENT. We think of the Magic Lantern as just an oil-lamp version of the slide projector, but Magic Lantern shows were animated in a wide variety of ways, including chemistry and electricity experiments.
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The Pichler lantern show was based on the harmonium. Again it was poorly pictured,
but the descriptions were good enough to imagine its internal structure.
The air reservoir fed two harmonium reeds mounted at right angles. Each reed was vibrating at the same frequency, and each had a delicate mirror riding on its end. As the reed wiggled, the mirror directed the light from the magic lantern to different angles. The lower reed moved the light left and right, and the light then fed the upper reed’s mirror, which angled the light up and down. Of course the vibration was happening much faster than I’m showing it, so the resultant movement on the screen was well above the eye’s flicker fusion threshold.
The result was a loop or ellipse, which varied as the two reeds gradually went in and out of phase. These shapes were more famous as Lissajous figures, but Pichler did it first and did it in the context of scientific entertainment.
Pichler then added a fret or strap to one of the reeds so he could vary the frequency easily, giving a wider variety of patterns. The separation of X and Y presaged the modern scope and CRT, with electrostatic deflectors bending an electron beam in two axes.
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Sidenote on the harmonium itself… When I googled pictures of harmonium reeds, most were newly made in India. The Euro reeds were old ‘museum’ pics. Searching for harmonium on Youtube gives the answer. Nearly all clips of actual harmonium performance are from India, playing Indian music. Nobody is performing old Euro organ or harpsichord music. The instrument has purely switched cultures, with all new players and new manufacturers in India.
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