Greggaphone

If you've known me long enough you might be familiar with a particularly bad joke that I tell with some regularity. Someone will say, "I'll give you a call." Then I'll ask, "On the phone?" To which the other person, baffled will respond.. "Yes." Then I'll ask, "Telephone or Saxophone?"

I attempted this joke on MSN talking to Vrej. Unfortunately I wrote "SaxA instead of SaxOphone." Anyone who knows Vrej knows that for him correcting spelling errors and grammar is as good as any auto-erotic recreation available on the internet. "Saxo " appeared in my msn window within seconds. While he went to clean himself up I wondered to myself, "I wonder where the word Saxophone comes from?"

A quick internet search yielded an answer that sounds almost made up. In fact, the inventor of the Saxophone was one Adolphe Sax who patented the invention in 1846. He was the son of Charles Sax who invented the less popular, Saxhorn.

The point is, if someone had asked me where the word saxophone comes from, that is probably exactly the story I would have invented, except I would have used the name, Steve Sax and he would have been trying to invent an auto-erotic device that one could use in the public without being noticed. The various openings and keys had the unfortunate side-effect of producing a sound that we now recognize as the saxophone, a fact discovered by his late mother Sandrine Sax, who walked in on him while he tested his new invention and died of a heart-attack. Though not inconspicuous enough to be used for its original purpose, the sexhorn produced a beautiful melody and the sound was soon pervasive in American music culture.