Swedish-American inventor Henry Konrad Sandell designed this device, the Mills Violano Virtuoso. It’s like a mechanical player piano, but it plays a violin. He patented it in 1905 along with Henry S. Mills of the Mills Novelty Company, a firm that made a wide variety of coin operated machines. Later designs added a piano in order to make the music more enjoyable than a solo violin could manage. Here’s how the violin component functioned:
The strings are bowed by four small wheels made of discs of celluloid clamped together, applying just the right pressure to the strings. These are driven by a delicate variable speed controlled motor to vary the volume of sound produced.
via Neatorama
January 27, 2014
This mechanism seems to be more successful than 10CC’s Gizmo (1970s) for guitar strings.