The Mighty Nelsonian (One-Man Music Machine Mystery Solved)

A Vintage Photos Theme Park photo for the theme of extraordinary (anything).

A few years ago I posted the following image of a real photo postcard featuring an unknown man playing an extraordinarily complicated One-Man Music Machine:



The photo was a mystery—I wasn't able to determine who the man was or what kind of contraption he was playing. Later I bought what I thought was a duplicate of the card and filed it away without inspecting it too closely.

More recently I was looking through a copy of Real Photo Postcards: Unbelievable Images from the Collection of Harvey Tulcensky (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). To my surprise, there on page 97 of the book was the same man and machine, and the caption indicated that there was writing on the other side of the card that provided a description:

"Handwritten: Nelson's 32 piece one man band, took 35 years to build, has 6,000 ft. of rubber tubing, 50,000 parts, weighing 2,800 lbs. Albert Nelson, Buffalo, NY."

When I pulled out my two copies of the card to compare them with the one in the book, I realized that I had two similar but different photos. Both showed the man seated at the machine, but in the second one I purchased the man is looking to his right so that his face is visible in profile. The machine is configured differently, too. For one thing, in this photo the fan-shaped shield at the lower right has one belt coming out of it while the image I previously posted has two belts.

With the information from the book, I was able to identify the man as Albert Nelson (1884-1964), who was originally from Buffalo, Minnesota (not Buffalo, New York). He spent many years working on different versions of his machine—called The Nelsonian—and became famous when he was hired to play it at the Ripley's Believe It or Not Odditorium during the Chicago World's Fair in 1933.

A history of the man and his machine was published in 2006. Gary Albert Hukriede, Nelson's grand nephew, authored the book, The Mighty Nelsonian: The Story of Albert Nelson, Inventor of "The Nelsonian One-Man-Band," 32 Musical Instruments Played by One Man (Minneapolis, Minn.: LifePath Histories). Although Albert Nelson, who passed away in 1964, was the only person who could play and maintain the Nelsonian, his remarkable music machine is on display today at the Wright County Historical Society Heritage Center in Buffalo, Minnesota.