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LOOK at this! Anyone know anything about this strange character?

http://cgi.ebay.de/Muenz-Grammophon-Hel ... 518dd6bbc9

The original disco ball...sort of

Wunderbar! Magisch!

Helios is the young Greek god of the sun.
Hercules is the very strong mortal son of Zeus.
As part of Hercules' tenth labor he was given from assistance
from Helios to complete the task.

Combine mythic power to a gramophone, add mood lighting and a coin slot...

Cha-ching!

James.

Disco ball, yes exactly. there should be colored glass where you see the holes in the brass ball, and it rotates driven by a connection under the turntable. Light is reflected across the room by the mirrors in the horn.

This was the first model, there were others in more enclosed cabinets.

Its very very very rare !!!

Price probably up to 8 or even 10'000 euro?

In German that would be a Wunderlicht and a "Wonder Light" of similar construction was a prominent feature of many large Wurlitzer nickelodeons in the old days. as said there should be faceted colored glass jewels covering the holes in the ball.

lampoilpunk

I remember for a while that a couple of people were actually posting, in addition to the link, a copy of the web page to which the link directs you (so that an image of the page, or at least the images on it, show up in the posting here)... basically to preserve the images once the auction expires or the craigslist listing ends, or the page dies, etc. ... is there any easy way of doing this so that it can be done more regularly? or at the very least, when people are uploading images, could they try to do it directly through the board rather than by way of link to something like pictiger or imagehound or whatever those other services are? I for one cannot access all of those sites through certain computers I use, as they're filtered out... so any images posted to them and linked to this forum don't show up when I'm reading it.

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of those link screen shots were done by David when he was not even the original poster. This is definately an "amazing and bizarre" phono, so I uploaded the pics from eBay.

Separately, anybody can easily do a screen capture. Here are 5 easy steps.

1) open the page you want to capture a picture and "frame it up" so what you see on the screen is what you want to see.
2) hit CTRL-PRINTSCREEN on your keyboard
3) open windows "paint" (or some kind of image software)
4) CTRL-V to paste your image
5) save your image and then upload it to the board in the thread.

that appears to be a german coin-op machine that someone has severely altered. I've got a similar one, but in mahogany. the machine looks right to some extent, but for the crank, the horn (which probably should be one of those massively oversized mammut horns) and the weird addition of that oil lamp-looking thing in the front - which I imagine was attached, along with the mirrored horn, to transform this machine into more of a decorative light than anything else. I haven't checked the ebay auction so I'm not sure of the price, but if it's not terribly expensive, this could be a decent project, it seems to be a revivable enough machine (the cabinet looks right, as does the tonearm, support bracket and even reproducer, and importantly, the motor and coin-op mechanism appears present (along with the portion that connects to the tonearm).

I am guessing this is original. There were many variations on the horns used for mammut-like coin ops, so with more curves and loops, some with straight brass horns. It essentially would have been a music and light show. Something like this would have certainly been in a bar or party atmosphere. I think its just clever, if gimmicky, engineering for the early 20th century. and I WANT IT.