hammers, but over the course of several hundred years

they've evolved into compact devices like this one. I'm sure you know how it

works: wind it up and it plays a tune. The melody is programmed on

this rotating drum. The drum has protrusions, called pins, that pluck

the teeth on the comb. The comb is a piece of steel with eighteen

teeth. Each tooth is a note. Longer teeth are lower notes and shorter

teeth are higher notes. The comb works like a multi-pronged tuning

fork. In this high speed video -- slowed by 250 times -- the drum

appears to not move, but you can see the teeth vibrate. The shorter

tooth is vibrating faster than this longer one. These vibrations

produce the sound. The teeth are like this saw blade, when it is

longer, it produces a lower note when plucked, and when shorter it

produces a higher note. Notice when you turn the comb over, the teeth

don't have the same thickness. The longer teeth — the lower notes —

are weighted more on the ends. This added weight lowers their resonant

frequency even farther. Here I taped a lead weight to the end of the

saw blade, and it produces a lower note than without the weight.

Because of this weighting the comb is more compact. For this

particular design, if the comb were unweighted it would have to be

roughly 40 percent longer to produce the same range of frequencies.

Another advantage of the weighting is that the combs can be mass

manufactured in a single size, you just cut away the proper amount of

material to produce a unique set of notes. For example, although each

comb has eighteen notes, the specific notes vary for a particular

song. Here's a music box playing London Bridge with a comb

specifically designed for this melody.

And now, here it is with the

comb cut for a different melody — This Old Man.

The timing is the same but the notes are different and it sounds odd. The difference in

weighting is so subtle that these two combs are indistinguishable by eye.

Inside the casing of the music box is a clockspring. It's a

coiled strip of steel that is 40 centimeters long unwound. The outer

end of the spring has a T-shape which affixes to the casing of the

music box and so holds it in place. The inner end of the spring has a

slot. This slot hooks onto a notch on a metal shaft. This shaft is

attached to the winding key. The shaft also has an angled six-tooth

ratchet gear. This gear fits inside this larger plastic gear. On the

inside there are four flexible pawls so the axle turns independently

from the plastic gear. This happens when the music box is wound.

When the spring unwinds, the axle turns in the opposite direction and the

six tooth gear catches the pawls, which rotates the larger plastic

gear with it. This rotation drives the music box. As the spring

unwinds, it rotates this bevel gear. Which engages a second bevel gear

affixed to the drum. But there's a problem with this set up — the

spring will unwind quickly and the music will play too fast.

This piece — called the governor — solves this problem. It's connected to

the drum by a gear train. The gear train is compactly built into the

music box. The rotation of the governor controls the speed: stop the

governor and the drum stops. The governor uses air resistance to

control the release of energy from the spring. Air resistance is

proportional to the velocity squared of the object. When started from

rest, the governor encounters little resistance and speeds up readily,

but when it spins rapidly — over 3,000 revolutions per minute — air

resistance swiftly increases which prevents it from moving much

faster. This action limits the speed of the governor and limits the

rotational speed of the drum. To spin the governor so fast, the music

box uses a multiplying gear train. It starts with the bevel gear

driven by a spring, which engages a smaller gear on the drum.

This multiples the rotational rate by the ratio of the number of teeth on

the larger gear to the number of teeth of the smaller gear -- here

2.75 times. The drum is also affixed to a larger gear, which engages

another smaller gear — this time multiplying the rotational speed by

5.75 times. The larger gear on this piece engages the smaller end of

another spur gear, further multiplying the rate by 6.3 times. Lastly,

this spur gear engages a worm screw on the shaft of the governor.

It moves so fast it's blurred -- here, slowed down by a factor of thirty,

the movement is visible. The gear that engages the worm screw differs

from the other gears: it has curled teeth. The shape of these teeth

allow it to better engage the screw. The worm screw turns once for

every tooth on the gear, and, since there are twenty-four teeth, it

multiplies the rotational rate by twenty-four times. This means that

for every single revolution of the first bevel gear, the governor

rotates 2,400 times. Since the first gear rotates roughly one and a

half times a minute, the governor spins at 3,600 revolutions per minute.

As I noted this music box evolved from devices that used bells

struck by hammers. The replacement of these bells with a comb was the

technical breakthrough that catalyzed a music box industry that

blossomed in the nineteenth century. The compact comb movements were

built into snuff boxes, clocks and large pieces of furniture.

As the industry flourished, music boxes grew more complex: some, for example,

sported dual barrels and combs, which played simultaneously to produce

rich harmonies. The first music boxes used cylinders, but were

superseded by boxes that used disks, which could be easily

changed. Here the melodies were punched into a metal disk. With this

innovation, music boxes shrunk and their cost declined. For a hundred

years music boxes where the way a family listened to music in the

home, but by the turn of the twentieth century the phonograph and

radio had displaced them. Music boxes were shoved into attics or,

more often, left to rot in junk yards. These modern music boxes,

then, are a charming vestige of a past filled with brilliant

engineering and craftsmanship. One last thing, if you hold a music box

in your hand, it's not very loud, but

if you place it on a hollow container,

it's much louder and richer. The vibrations of the comb are

transferred through the metal base, into the container where they resonate.

This resonance amplifies the sound. Also, if you rest the

music box gently against your teeth, the music will resonate inside

your skull. So, the next time you listen to a music box appreciate

its sound, but also think of the centuries of innovation and design

that lead to it. I'm Bill Hammack, the engineer guy.

The drum has protrusions, called pens, that pluck the teeth of the comb. The

comb. pins, pens, right? Pins. Ins. Pens. Ok, I'll get it.

The drum has protrusions, called pens. The drum has protrusions, called

pens. Pens, pin. Ok. The drum has protrusions, called pens that plunk

the teeth. Did I get it right? In, in, pen. Pen. The drum . . . . Now, I can't say the

"i-n" one because when I say it I say pan. Pin. Pin. Pin. Okay. The

The drum has protrusions, called pens, that pluck the teeth of the

comb. The comb is a piece of . . . Did I not get it?

Pen. Pin. Pin. Pen. Pen. Is that right?