Brass by mail

We were at our friends the other day and got to flip through a reproduction of a 1900 Sears Roebuck catalog, full of puzzling and amusing retro marvels. The fashion section all bristling with mustaches, the medical pages with a $0.75 "Reliable Cure For the Opium And Morphia Habit" and "vegetable cure for female weakness," livestock section with unspeakable contraptions for embryotomy (real word) and deballment etc.etc. And then I got to the musical instruments, which had me completely mystified. The picture above (from Horn-u-copia) is not from the 1900 catalog, but has most of the items. What a marvel of variety! Eb cornet, Bb cornet, C cornet, solo Eb alto, circular alto, bell-up alto, Bb tenor, Bb baritone, Bb bass, Eb bass, Eb contrabass, and any number of trombones.

Now, it took me forever to figure out the brass nomenclature, but I thought I had it sorted: Bb piccolo and a variety of high trumpets in D, Eb, F, A - Bb cornet or trumpet - Eb alto/tenor/mellophone (UK vs US terminology) - Bb baritone/euphonium (one octave below trumpet) - Bb tuba (two octaves below trumpet) - Eb tuba. Now the catalog is messing it up. What the hell is a Bb tenor? Is it the same Bb as baritone, but smaller bore? then why is it grouped with alto? Or is it an octave below trumpet and baritone yet another octave lower? That seems unlikely, given there is is also a bass (another octave lower) and a contrabass, which should boldly cross the lower human perception limits and also be pretty damn hard to play.

Another mystery is - why did all they all go extinct? They used to be common enough to be put in a catalog with bicycles and women's fashions. Now, I doubt one in a thousand even knows the word mellophone or can identify a baritone by name; not even musicians recognize it in my hands. Horn-u-copia also has a pdf with Sears catalog scans spanning 1897-1963, and you can clearly trace the rise and fall of brass. 1908 page has the most variety. Several trumpet models appear in 1927, but alto, baritone and bass are now confined to a footnote and "are unmailable", there is no tenor, solo alto, or contrabass. In 1937 there is but one trumpet, one cornet, and one trombone, ditto 1956 and 1963. What a loss!

PS: A mystery revealed! From Bob Beecher site:
The tenor and the baritone horn were both pitched in Bb (B-flat). Studying illustrations from early makers' catalogs, they also appear about the same size, except that the tenor horn has slightly narrow tubing - or a smaller bore - and a quicker flare at the bell. These differences affect the timbre of the instrument, giving the tenor horn a brighter sound. So, although it may play in the same range as the baritone, the tenor horn will not sound quite the same. Somewhere along the way, the names Tenor and Baritone Horn evolved into Baritone and Euphonium, respectively.