The Pianola was invented in 1896, by Edwin Votey of Detroit, USA, and initially took the form of a large wooden cabinet that stood in front of any ordinary piano. From the rear of the cabinet protruded a row of wooden fingers that were aligned with the keyboard of the piano and played the keys in the same manner as a human pianist.
	The basic principal upon which Votey's system operated subsequently became the standard for virtually all roll operated piano playing systems. The Aeolian Corporation in the USA acquired the rights to the Pianola and marketed the very first instrument of its kind, later becoming the world's leading manufacturer of roll operated instruments.
The musical repertoire was greatly limited, not least by the cost and dimensions of the wooden barrels, each of which would contain a small number of short tunes. In contrast, the paper music rolls used by the Pianola were cheap, compact and easy to mass-produce.
The early external players are often referred to as 'push-ups', simply because they were pushed up to the piano when required for use. However, they were heavy, cumbersome and difficult to move whenever the owner wished to play the piano by hand. Shortly after the turn of the century, Melville Clark introduced a piano called the 'Apollo', with a built-in player mechanism and thus was born the player piano. This concept, quickly adopted by other manufacturers, ultimately led to the demise of the external player.
Early instruments could only play a range of 58 or 65 notes from the music roll, whereas the piano typically had 85 or 88 keys. This prevented the accurate rendition of many classical pieces, some of which were specially adapted to accommodate the reduced musical scale. In addition, a number manufacturers developed their own design of music roll, usually incompatible with other makes of instrument, an example being Hupfeld who introduced a 73 note system.
A convention held in 1908 brought about a new industry standard, namely the 88-note roll, subsequently adopted by all manufacturers. A number of fledgling companies who had invested in design and tooling for production of 65-note systems, were literally put out of business by this important development.