A Slide Sax That Didn’t Catch On

As I was researching an article on slide saxophones that I’m writing, I happened across the following oddity, which by all accounts, didn’t catch on. In June 1932, Martin Juhn of Lakewood, Ohio applied for a patent for a circular slide saxophone.

     Source: Google Patents

Perhaps a saxophone historian reading this article might know differently, but I have not been able to find any information that would indicate that this slide saxophone was ever manufactured. There might be a variety of prototypes floating around, but it doesn’t appear that Juhn successfully marketed his horn to any manufacturers of the day.

Given how complicated and rather convoluted this horn seems to be, perhaps this failure to launch is not that surprising. The K.I.S. method was definitely not employed in the design of this interesting slider.

Nonetheless, Juhn’s patented slide sax had a number of very interesting features. They included:

• A circular body tube (5);
• An octave key (27);
• Automatically controlled overblow valves (28 & 29) and;
• A neck that swivels (6) out of the way to make it more compact for carrying around in a smaller case;

In his patent application, Martin Juhn described his slide saxophone as follows:

This invention relates to wind instruments of the saxophone type and has for its object to provide an instrument of this character in which the tonal pitch is controlled by a slide which varies the length of the horn passage, and by which slurring or gradual variation of tone may be obtained in passing from one note to another over a relatively wide range.

     Source: Google Patents

To get a relatively quick overview of how this slider worked, Juhn’s Claims do a good job of providing us with the details:

A further object of the invention is to control the tone by means of an endless slide which in moving through one complete revolution varies the tone through a desired range.

 

A further object is to provide means by which the tone of the instrument may be changed an amount corresponding to the range provided by the slide whereby the range of the instrument is doubled.

 

A further object is to provide an octave key movement including overblow valves located at different distances from the mouth piece which are automatically controlled by the movement of the slide when the octave key is depressed in order to properly regulate the tone for different positions of the tone controlling slide.

 

A further object of the invention is to provide an instrument of simple and rugged construction which is adapted to be folded to a form such as may be housed in a relatively small instrument case.

     Source: Google Patents

The most complicated and convoluted part of Juhn’s instrument were the overblow valves, which worked in combination with the octave key and slide. The description of how these overblow valves worked starts on page 2 of the Description, and goes on for 1½ pages.

If you compare this complicated mechanism to the very simple Swanee sax, or even the more sophisticated Reiffel and Husted, with its octave key, there really is no comparison. IMHO, Juhn’s novel horn was over-engineered—especially given the time period.

This was after all, during The Great Depression. Saxophone production was slowing down, and novel saxophone ideas—such as the Conn-O-Sax, F mezzo-soprano, Saxello, et al—developed by established saxophone manufacturers, were beginning to fall by the wayside. Developing a complicated horn, such as Juhn’s slider, would have been expensive, and for a novelty item, unlikely to sell at a profit, or perhaps even recoup its R&D costs.

It’s a shame that this quirky slide sax didn’t get off the ground. It would be really interesting to have some circular saxophones out there in the performance arena.