The
short video presented on this page is thought to have been filmed circa 1928
by a European crew, and possibly for the purpose of honoring a very
successful Swedish citizen, Mr. J. P. Seeburg, founder of the J. P. Seeburg
Piano Company of Chicago. The source of the original film footage currently
remains a mystery to this author, but it at some point the Seeburg related footage was excerpted and transferred to
a modern video format (i.e., PAL a European video format). From the
condition of the film images it is clear that the original motion picture
film was obviously in a state of deterioration at the time of conversion to
a video format.
The source of the VHS video tape (from which this brief video excerpt was
made) is Don Teach, a collector of automatic musical instruments, and his
source was the late Claes O. Friberg (1945 - 1996), a music machine
collector, historian, and dealer (Mekanisk Musik Museum) in Copenhagen, Denmark. Claes
supplied a PAL (European format) video tape from his archive, and that tape was converted to
VHS after he sent it to Don Teach.
Video Quality
There is NO audio with this video presentation. The visual quality of the
images are good to poor, due to film deterioration occurring before
capturing and transferring the vintage images to a PAL video format. But,
subsequently, there have been more quality losses due to the transfer from
PAL to the VHS video format, and then a little more resolution was probably
lost when capturing the old VHS tape and converting the image data into
standard DVD quality 720 x 480 AVI files. Moreover, because the Mechanical
Music Press web site has no associated media server the screen size for this
video presentation has been kept relatively small so as to conserve
bandwidth and thereby provide a reasonably smooth flow of video data.
Video Contents
The video, with a running time of approximately two minutes,
consists of several sequential categorical sections, as follows:
Exterior view of the Seeburg factory. This appears to be nothing
more that a film segment showing a large painting or artistic rendering
of the Seeburg factory.
The Seeburg factory office, with J.P. Seeburg standing and talking
to his son, N. Marshall Seeburg, who is seated at his office desk.
Showroom scene with a Seeburg KT Special (at left) and some type of
keyboardless, roll operated residence, mortuary, or small theater type
pipe organ.
A view inside the Seeburg factory, showing men working on a music
roll frame and (at left) a race horse mechanism, and a final quick view
of men finishing what look to be style K or KT type piano sounding
boards.
Viewing the Video
To view the Seeburg Office and Factory Video requires that you have a
current browser version of Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or
Safari, which natively support the new HTML 5 Video tag.
Comments and/or new information regarding the video can be sent to
A Brief Synopsis of J.P. Seeburg
Beginning
in 1887, Justus P. Seeburg spent 18 years working in the piano industry in
the Chicago area, first for C.A. Smith (which later became Smith, Barnes &
Strohber), then Bush & Gertz, then as manager of the Conover piano
manufacturing facility of the Chicago Cottage Organ Company (which became
the Cable Company), and then by co-founding the Kurtz-Seeburg Action Company
in Rockford, Illinois.
J.P. Seeburg (1871-1958) had one son, N. Marshall Seeburg (1898-1972). In turn, Marshall had two sons, J.P. Seeburg II (1922-2002) and N. Marshall Seeburg Jr. (1924-2016).
In 1905, Seeburg returned to Chicago and entered the coin-operated piano
field at the Marquette Piano Company, where he and his associates built the
first coin pianos and operated them "on location" in the city. In 1907, he
founded the J.P. Seeburg Piano Company, which distributed the entire output
of the Marquette Company. By 1909, the J.P. Seeburg Piano Company began
selling pianos with the Seeburg name and mechanisms. Beginning at this time,
Seeburg purchased pianos from several different manufacturers and built and
installed the player mechanisms at the Seeburg factory.
For the next 20 years, Seeburg went on to manufacture a complete line of coin-operated pianos and orchestrions with art glass fronts, and photoplayers for silent movie theatres. When prohibition was enacted in 1919, J.P. Seeburg’s son Marshall finished his education and came to work with his father. The two opened the new Marshall Piano Co. for the purpose of manufacturing their own pianos, and then consolidated the old company into it, reverting to the J.P. Seeburg Piano Company name. With the manufacturing of almost all components including the cabinets and strung piano backs in their new Dayton St. location, Seeburg became the dominant manufacturer of compact keyboardless coin pianos and orchestrions for speakeasies. During the 1920s, Marshall also established a large network of distributors throughout the U.S. and later, worldwide. The firm’s last major product line before amplified radios and phonographs caused the demise of the automatic piano industry was a series of self-playing piano/organ combinations sold mainly to mortuaries.
Marshall became interested in developing a coin-operated phonograph by the mid-1920s, and had the new Seeburg Audiophone, an 8-tune selective model, on the market by 1928. From this time on, Seeburg became one of the world’s largest makers of coin-operated phonographs. J.P. retired and moved to Stockholm, Sweden, his country of origin, in 1954.
With substantial inheritance taxes looming, the family sold the company to Ft. Pitt Industries in 1956 and J.P. passed away in 1958. After selling the company, Marshall and his sons focused their attention on real estate (including land development around O’Hare International Airport, which had just opened in 1955) and other financial ventures.
Credits:
Historical information courtesy of Art Reblitz, Terry Hathaway, and Mick Seeburg (son of J.P. Seeburg II).
Video:
Video courtesy of the late Claes O. Friberg and Don Teach. PAL/VHS video capture
and digitizing by Terry Hathaway.
The
short video presented on this page is thought to have been filmed circa 1928
by a European crew, and possibly for the purpose of honoring a very
successful Swedish citizen, Mr. J. P. Seeburg, founder of the J. P. Seeburg
Piano Company of Chicago. The source of the original film footage currently
remains a mystery to this author, but it at some point the Seeburg related footage was excerpted and transferred to
a modern video format (i.e., PAL a European video format). From the
condition of the film images it is clear that the original motion picture
film was obviously in a state of deterioration at the time of conversion to
a video format.
Beginning
in 1887, Justus P. Seeburg spent 18 years working in the piano industry in
the Chicago area, first for C.A. Smith (which later became Smith, Barnes &
Strohber), then Bush & Gertz, then as manager of the Conover piano
manufacturing facility of the Chicago Cottage Organ Company (which became
the Cable Company), and then by co-founding the Kurtz-Seeburg Action Company
in Rockford, Illinois.