Music boxes

Last week we visited the artist's village of Ein Hod with some friends. It's
about 40 mins drive north of here on the way to Haifa. It was a beautiful
day, temp around 20 deg C, and we wandered around, visiting some of the
galleries. Ein Hod itself was established by Marcel Janco a Jewish Romanian
dada artist from Paris, who settled in Israel. He established the artist's
colony and his own studio became the first of many.
Then down a winding lane we found the Museum of Mechanical Music that we
had come to see. This was established about 3 months ago by Nissan Cohen,
who is quite a character. He used to own a tiny toy store on the main street
of Netanya, which specialized in mechanical toys. Apparently he had been
doing that all his life, when he worked for NBC in the US he owned toy stores
on the side and collected music boxes from all over Europe. Three months ago
he moved to Ein Hod and set up the Nisco museum.
In the main room of the museum Nissan has about 40 music boxes set out,
but some of them are large, and include among the first jukeboxes. One
comes from a German railroad station and had a slot for putting in coins,
and a metal perforated disc that was replaced every day for a different
piece of music. The heyday of music boxes lasted only from 1850-1900 and
he has examples from throughout that period showing an increase in
sophistication.
They were then replaced by the mechanical gramophone. This was invented
by Thomas Edison, but he initially used metal cylinders. A Jewish man named
Emile Berliner invented the idea of using bakelite disks in place of the metal
cylinders. Edison turned down the offer of a collaboration, because he did not
want to use his invention for making music, only for business. Berliner and
his partners founded the Gramophone Company, that in 1900 became His
Master's Voice, and they became very rich because people wanted music in
their homes.
Nissan can sit on his balcony and view the town of Atlit on the coast and the
Mediterranean Sea spread out before him. Very nice. We went into Atlit, that
has a restored former British internment camp, and we found the famous Ben
Ezra fish restaurant, where we had a terrific lunch. A nice day out, far from
the concerns of security and politics.