The Wurtlitzer Connection

Pre-Triennale foundations in the canal along the Potterierei.

 Sunday morning, March 25^th, I delivered something to a friend’s house then wandered along the Potterierei and was quite taken by a large, heavy-looking structure in the water, almost certainly a foundation for an art installation in the Triennale due to open in mid-May. The first Triennale in 2015 was most diverting and interesting. It involved around 18 structures – artistic creations often with narratives added, by various artists and, I think, architects, at points around the city. I loved the unexpected and thought-provoking attention it aroused among residents and tourists. I await Triennale 2, named The Liquid City, impatiently.

Towards the end of the canal, before the Dampoort, I stopped for a coffee at Het Molenhuis, already open at 10.00 a.m. though quite far from the centre and thirsty tourists. My padded jacket enabled me to sit outside and read but when I went inside to pay, a great delight was on show. A genuine Wurtlitzer had been installed and it instantly took me back to the very occasional visit to the cinema when I was young and the more regular visits of early womanhood. Glamour; music; excitement!

' T Molenhuis

Rudolph Wurtlitzer

1829-1914

The owner corrected my immediate assumption; it was not an early original but a reproduction, he said. Couldn’t wait to go googlen, as they write here! Wurtlitzer has been synonymous with up-to-the-minute juke-boxes since the early Thirties and if I had thought of them at all, I would have assumed they were now defunct.

Oh the joys of finding out stuff online! The Wurtlitzer family began making musical instruments in the seventeenth century in Saxony but the ‘father’of the original American company was Rudolph, born in 1829. He emigrated to America, against his father's wishes, at the age of 24 and in 1856 founded the Rudolph Wurtlitzer Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, initially to import his family’s instruments though eventually Rudolph moved into manufacturing himself. His factory produced the first Wurtlitzer piano in 1880 followed by the first coin-operated electric piano, the Tonophone, in 1896 which became an overnight sensation and won a gold medal at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901. So by the age of forty, Rudolph was demonstrating a flair for innovation and commercial creativity!

Close-up of a Mighty Wurtlitzer

Historical coincidence often provides a wonderful niche when innovation miraculously discovers a developing and amenable context and thus it was for Rudolph. The Wurtlitzer Company’s inventive flair and use of advanced technology happened synonymously with the advent of silent films and the Mighty Wurtlitzers created an instant impact. These fostered Wurtlitzer-driven sound tracks to the movies and led eventually to the first patented jukebox machines in 1933. They could produce bird tweets, thunder rolls, steam engine roars and car horn hoots! Europe's largest and still playable Mighty Wurtlitzer with over 1000 pipes and 299 stops, is today housed in Berlin's Musical Instrument Museum.

Farny Wurtlitzer, Rudolph’s successor, had the vision to add highly-skilled professionals to his entourage to design and market what became the Wurtlitzer Debutante. By the late 1930s, the Company was producing around 45,000 juke-boxes a year!

In the late 1930s and throughout the 40s the Wurtlitzer chief designer was the gifted Paul Fuller and he took the inventiveness and charm of the product to a higher level yet. From 1941 Wurtlitzer factories had to switch to war-related production and the use of metal and plastics was severely curtailed. The firm, aka Paul Fuller, responded by designing and producing several revolutionary prototypes using mainly wood and glass. In 1946 the Wurtlitzer 1015 was introduced and became an immediate hit with its sophisticated styling, revolving colour columns and modern, record-changing mechanism. Post war, American G.I.s took the jukeboxes with them to an astonished West Germany and between 1955 and1960 jukebox numbers totalled around 50,000 in that country.

Wurtlitzer 1015

1946

My interest was sparked that Sunday morning when I wandered along the canal and into Het Molenhuis and saw the resident 1015. I think it might be the 1015 One More Time, described as: ‘a nostalgic reproduction of the original Model 1015 that has been up-dated with state-of-the-art digital technology’ Perfectly in keeping with the values and vision of the original Wurlitzer Company.

Honestly, there is a surprise around every corner here in Brugge and in one small, canal-side estaminet, there is a whole narrative in one reborn, glowing objet d'art.