A New Concertina Patent?

[Anglogeezer]

Surfing the web, as I do from time to time, I came across this recently published concertina patent.

One Way Airflow

I dare say it's been tried before, is this likely to find favour with the world's squeezers??

Forgive me if this has already been discussed, a quick search showed nothing.

Jake

[mike averill]

Interesting idea but unlikley to play in tune. On the suck the reed has air going from atmospheric pressure to below atmospheric, on the blow it goes from above atmospheric to atmospheric. Experience from modifyiing melodian reed layouts has taught me that free reeds need tuning differently to give the same pitch in these two conditions.

[Richard Morse]

Interesting idea but unlikley to play in tune. On the suck the reed has air going from atmospheric pressure to below atmospheric, on the blow it goes from above atmospheric to atmospheric. Experience from modifyiing melodian reed layouts has taught me that free reeds need tuning differently to give the same pitch in these two conditions.

I'm not sure of that. There've been a number of one-way boxes made which I would imagine sound the same pitch both ways. A good example of a one-way concertina is an unusual 10-sided Maccann which came up on eBay several years ago. Neil Wayne wound up getting it can called it the "Blue Meanie" because the bellows look blue in the eBay photos (but they're really black). Besides the interesting mechanisms that made the reeds sound on push or pull of the bellows, it has doubled reeds to give it a tremolo sound.

 

-- Rich --

[Dana Johnson]

Interesting idea but unlikley to play in tune. On the suck the reed has air going from atmospheric pressure to below atmospheric, on the blow it goes from above atmospheric to atmospheric. Experience from modifyiing melodian reed layouts has taught me that free reeds need tuning differently to give the same pitch in these two conditions.

Ditto on Rich's comment. Many years ago, I worked on a hayden type layout using an essentially identical arrangement to this patent ( different in that it was single reeded ). Tuning of the reed wasn't a problem, but I found the volume output was poor compared to the normal orientation of the reed on reed pan, or even accordion style reed block mounting. I made the assumption at the time that the more convoluted the airflow, the less volume you got out of it. While this may be true, I simply may not have tried an appropriate arrangement. Getting a "rectified" ariflow seems invariably to add a separate air space to the design, and my experience is that it eats sound. Unless you could equal the volume of any current standard, Any gain by using one reed would be lost by needing more reeds for added volume. I don't know what the Blue meanie sounded like, but I also made a similar arrangement as an experiment. Vastly inferior to the afore mentioned, but again, I found mounting the reeds perpendicular to the concertina axis cut down the sound compared to the direct output horizontal chamber. Never know what poor design and excecution on my part may have contributed to the result. Had considerably more success with an early Hayden conversion. Same materials, different orientation.

Dana

[Stephen Chambers]

I dare say it's been tried before ...

Jake,

 

Like in Fig.13 of Charles Wheatsone's 1844 Patent?

 

 

... is this likely to find favour with the world's squeezers??

Well it hasn't so far, in the last 160-odd years.

 

Forgive me if this has already been discussed, a quick search showed nothing.

The last time something of the sort cropped up was only a few weeks ago, but it wasn't in connection with this patent. I doubt if the inventor will "get rich quick" from it.

[Theodore Kloba]

Surfing the web, as I do from time to time, I came across this recently published concertina patent.

When I did an online search of US patents a while ago, I think I found about a dozen variations of the single-reed-for-both-bellows-directions theme without even trying. (I was searching for something else in the same classifications). Considering that the ostensible goal of such innovations was to simplify the instrument by reducing reed count and eliminating valves, it's amazing how much complexity the inventors introduced into the system: intricate multipart reedplates, valved chambers, pallets connected through the valveboard with linkages, etc... I don't have my notes from that search handy, but I could find them post a few if anyone is interested.