saxomophone (13. 283)

Awarded a patent on this day in 1846 for his most well-known but not most successful and certainly not his only epynomous instrument, Adoolphe Sax was already a respected faculty member of the Paris Conservatory. The eldest son of a husband and wife team of brass and woodwind specialists in Dinant (present day Belgium) and amazingly surviving a notoriously accident prone childhood–recovering unscathed from a fall of three storeys, swallowing a pin, mistakenly drinking an acidic solvent somehow not dying of asphixiation from sleeping in a room nightly that doubled as a storage space for drYing varished instruments–the prolific tinkerer's most widely adopted improvement was for valve controls for the bugle, which he tried unsuccessful secure rights on as the Saxhorn, which led to the development of the euphonium and fluegelhorn, adaptations particularly useful outside of the concert hall for marching bands. Later during the Crimean Conflict, Sax also patented two inventions for the war effort in support France and her allies, though never field-tested, in the Saxotonnerre–an organ powered by a locomotive engine loud enough in theory to be heard across an area the size of Paris and in response to the stalemale during the Siege of Sevestapol, the Saxocannon capable of launching half-tonne rounds with the aim of curtailing protracted standoffs. Sadly the upkeep of intellectual property and fighting infringement by challengers and rivals in later life took a huge toll on Sax‘ finances and health.