Boston, Massachusetts
‘Phonoharp Company’ – Henry Charles Marx

Wood, metal, paint
ca. 1920’s
Length: 19 in; Width: 13 in
Strings – Zithers 

The ‘Marxophone’ is a fretless zither that combines two or more instruments into one. Typically, the left hand strums the chords (strings on the left), while the right hand plays the melody strings.  The right side or melody notes consist of a system of spring action metal hammers that are activated by pressing the steel strips at the bottom of the instrument, with the right hand fingers, causing the hammer tips to strike the dual strings.  When a steel strip is held down with the finger, it causes the hammer to bounce, creating a sustained tone, much like a tremolo. It features two octaves of double melody strings in the key of C major, and four sets of chord strings (C major, G major, F major, and D7).

The marxophone was one of the late 19^th and early 20^th century musical gadgets, such as the banjolin, mandolin-uke, pianoette, pianolin, etc.  It was mainly sold by door-to-door salesmen and through mail-order companies, such as Sear-Roebuck, as an ‘easy -to-play’ instrument.  While the design of its hammer mechanism was patented by Henry Charles Marx (1875-1947), (pat. #1044553 issued on November 19, 1912) the patent was assigned to the Phonoharp Company, based in Boston, Massachusetts, which Marx was affiliated with at the time.

Phonoharp manufactured Marxophones until its merger with Oscar Schmidt Inc. in 1926. The newly formed company known as the International Musical Corporation produced Marxophones between 1926 and 1931. Then, following the International Musical Corporation’s dissolution on December 30, 1931, two successor companies, the Oscar Schmidt-International Corporation (1931-1936) and Oscar Schmidt-International, Inc., manufactured Marxophones until the 1950s.

Resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxophone