ElkRiverHarmonicas
928 posts
May 02, 2012
6:16 PM
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I'd like to add a little historical perspective on that time period when the Marine Band was developed.
This was a time of revolution in the harmonica design. German harmonica makers started turning to a global market in the 1870s and reeds were still basically made by hand. There was a huge potential demand, but an extremely finite manufacturing capacity thanks to the reed production - and I think this is a major reason there were hundreds of harmonica manufacturers of all sizes in the 19th Century.
In 1878 somebody in Klingenthal (it may have been at Seydel) developed a form-tool machine that could spit out reeds like bullets from a Gatling gun (reeds are still made pretty much this way). That was huge by itself - and all the big companies soon copied it - but it was immediately followed by this explosion of concepts of harmonica science - of changing things to alter tone. The two leaders in developing these tonal concepts and technology were Richard Seydel Sr. and Jacob Hohner in the 1890s. They experimented with cover plates to alter tone. I've not been able to pin an exact timeline for this, but Seydel (under Richard's watch) was also experimenting with variations in the width of reeds as well. One reedslot configuration was a lot like the one Hohner and everybody else uses. The other was the even width-reedslots that's in the modern Seydels.
Richard Seydel's design favors channeling air flow from five directions to change the tone. That's what the megaphones on the bandmaster were for. If you look at one, there are the two big obvious megaphone vents on the open end, and the coverplate SCREW - yes they were using screws - was offset moved up toward the player so air could flow from there. Then there are two smaller vents on each side above the screw (in the direction of the player) to allow air to flow perpendicularly across the upper edge of the reed plate. The bandmasters from the 1919-1939 were really open, like the Mouse Ear Marine Band, but the original 1890s design was kind of closed at the bottom... so most of your air was channeled through the vent openings.
This is basically how a side vent works to change tone, by rechanneling this air. Jacob Hohner was thinking about mechanical resonance to make the coverplate a sounding board, get it off the reedplate by minimizing points of contact and you change the tone. Jacob describes this at length in his Marine Band patent and Pat points it out on the page linked to above.
Seydel's design became the prewar Bandmaster. It's pretty obvious his theory was correct - and Jacob Hohner's idea for the Mouse Ear Marine Band also redirects direction of air flow to or from the reed in a similar way.
I think Jacob Hohner had some point in the whole resonance of coverplates thing, but most of the tonal change was from air flow. The ultimate reason for the tonal change isn't significant, the import thing is, he and Richard Seydel Sr. figured out how to do it. Hohner eventually figured out the actual reason for the tonal change. In the late 1920s early 1930s when they redesigned the Marine Band, when instead of minimizing points of contact, they brought the coverplate down to the reedplate and just put in simple side vents.
If you stop and think about what Jacob Hohner and Richard Seydel Sr. did, it's really cool. It was a huge leap and it set the "tone" for diatonic harmonicas for the next century and counting.
If you want to get an idea of how air moves to a reed, look at Figures 38 and 39 of the B-radical patent. It goes into great detail describing the air flow to and from reeds on the B-radical.
It's easy to lose sight of how freakin' revolutionarily awesome these concepts were for the time. I believe that to present, there have been 4 world-changing revolutions in harmonica technology. This 1880s - 1890s time period was THE most significant of them all.
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David
Elk River Harmonicas
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Last Edited by on May 02, 2012 6:30 PM
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