First, I tried to get the boxy contraption to play, and then the auction-house staffer, who was just as curious as me about this instrument, tried it.
As we watched the paper roll round a cylinder on the PlaRola, we heard nothing. Shouldn’t we be hearing music from this thing, I asked. There were narrow slits on the paper similar to the music rolls used on player pianos, but this instrument was obviously made to fit a child’s hand.
An inscription on the front indicated that it was easy to play: “If You Can Breathe, You can Pla Rola.”
Well, we were both breathing, but we weren’t hearing a thing as we turned the “play” handle on the side. Turn after turn, but no sound. Unfortunately, there were no instructions to guide us.
Finally, we just assumed the instrument was a joke and it was supposed to be silent. Later, I learned that we were wrong.
When I Googled PlaRola, I learned that it was to be played like a harmonica. You had to blow into a mouthpiece on the back – one of several round holes – while turning the “play” handle. (There’s another handle on the side for rewinding.) The sound is created when the air you blow in comes out through holes in the cylinder and paper.
Even if I had known that, there was no way I was going to put my lips on an instrument that came from who knows where and had been through who knows what.
The PlaRola was described in an ad as an “automatic harmonica that plays music rolls like a player piano.”
The instrument had been around since the first half of the 20th century. A man named Harry Pullen of the PlaRola Corp. of Easton, MD, filed his first patent for the instrument in 1937. Some of the PlaRolas were found to be “imperfect and defective,” so he filed a new patent application with improvements. That patent was granted in 1940.
A 1938 newspaper ad indicated that folks were attempting to buy the instrument from the company’s factory, but they were told that they could purchase it from Montgomery Ward.
The instrument was made of “metal with a regular chromatic organ built right inside,” and marketed to both boys and girls, according to an ad in a Johnson Smith & Co. catalog.
It was “one of the most popular instruments ever devised for the amateur player. … There is no trouble or anything. Just slip in a roll and start playing. All you have to do is just crank and blow,” the ad stated.
The PlaRola cost $1.29, and music rolls could be purchased for 12 cents each (that’s how sellers could make their money, an ad to dealers noted). The rolls contained a variety of popular music in various genres. A machine that sold for $120 at an auction in 2012 included the tunes “Sweet Adeline,” “Sweet and Low,” “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” “Silent Night,” “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” “When You and I were Young, Maggie.”
Pullen’s instrument was one of several that combined a harmonica with a player piano. Another, the Rolmonica, had been around since the 1920s. It was described in an ad as a “pocket size jazz band.” It sold for $1.50, with music rolls containing 200 popular tunes at 15 cents each. It was made by the Rolmonica Music Co. of Baltimore.
