Edwin S. Votey: Invented the Player Piano

Votey (right) shows his new invention

June 8 was the birthday of Edwin S. Votey (1856-1931), inventor of, among other things, the player piano.

Votey grew up in Ovid, New York, then moved to West Brattleboro Vermont with his family at age 17 when his father, a Baptist minister, was assigned to a new congregation. Life around churches made Votey interested in organs, and, as it happened the Estey Organ Company was located in nearby Brattleboro. He started out as a clerk there. In time he learned the entire business, became a mechanic, a salesman, and finally an executive in the trade with various companies. He patented around 20 organ and piano related inventions, of which the player piano, or Pianola (patented 1896) was the most significant.

The player piano works on a principal similar to that of a music box. There is a spool containing a roll of paper with holes (as opposed to the raised pins on a music box cylinder). The holes are arranged such that when the paper unspools, they trigger the hammers that hit the piano strings. It was simple and ingenious and who’d ‘a’ thunk there’d be a market for it during an era when plenty of people played the piano, but the device became wildly popular for decades. As it happens, those years coincided with the ragtime era, and that music and the machine are often associated with one another. The difficulty of playing ragtime, with its well-known rhythmic innovations) may have been a factor.

Naturally, I love the steam-punk historical charm of these devices with their echoes of 1896… but I’ve come to find what they represent to be ominous. As always, the pessimism of Kurt Vonnegut foresaw the coming dystopia. His 1952 sci-fi novel Player Piano used the title to represent the emptiness of life in an entirely mechanized society, where machines have replaced the work that used to be done by people. The roots of this historical process start with the industrial loom (which, believe it or not, I wrote about here), one of the first machines to make human craftspeople obsolete. Most of us were raised to think of Neo-Luddites as philistines and cave people. Progress is inevitable! Who but a fool would fight it? Which is easy to say if you don’t feel directly affected, if you haven’t been replaced, or don’t fear its inevitability. But the player piano roll presages the paper punch card and the early days of computing. And then circuitry and then digital memory. And we reach the point where machines not only replace physical laborers but everyone.

And unthinkably, artists. My first inkling of this happened almost half a century ago. My brother is a musician. In the ’70s the drum machine began to encroach on what he regarded as his contribution to the world. Seeing things from his perspective, I have never been able to give my entire heart over to popular music that relies too much on technology in this way. Obviously, catchy music is catchy music. But most of them time I can’t (won’t) transcend my contrarian belief that music made by imperfect, quirky human beings is superior to that spewed out by machines at the press of the button, and later “fixed” and “corrected” to be even more “perfect” by technicians. I’m interested in human expression, not a bunch of automatically reproduced sounds. And extrapolating that out, I am not interested in pictures drawn by AI or articles written by AI. At that stage, what is the point of human existence? We have ceded government, whose job is the happiness and safety of its citizens, over to machines in the form of polls. We have ceded journalism, which once kept us informed, over to the whim of the algorithm. And now even the creation of beauty seems likely to be ripped away, at least as far as mass culture is concerned.

I don’t lay all this at Votey’s feet. He’s just a cog in the historical process, and you can point to just about everything that’s happened since the Industrial Revolution as being just as culpable, including the very topics I write about here. Vaudeville chains replaced independent theatres. Motion pictures displaced those who worked in live theatre. On and on.

But there’s a portent of worse too in another of Votey’s inventions. During World War One he was hard at work on an early version of a pilotless airplane, to be guided, one assumes, by something like his piano player roles. Nikola Tesla actually worked on similar devices with his early wireless technology. We have this stuff now. Drones, missile guidance systems, etc. Why is the human race so good at murder and cruelty, so lousy at meaning and compassion?

Now: it’s a virtual certainty that an AI generated article about the creation of the piano player would NOT have gone off on a tangent about the evils of mechanization and the doom of the human race. That is because it is a THING. It does not consider, at least of its own accord, that YOU matter or that the death of human purpose might be SAD. There is a point at which the mania for economic efficiency becomes inimical to the well-being of the people it was ostensibly intended to benefit. My own formulation, as could only occur to a real, flesh-and-blood Drama Queen, is that when humanity dies, if there is a funeral march at all, it will sound from a player piano.