The Busy Bee is one of the most charming instruments of its day.  It embodies the vision of a man of courage and ambition who created a small talking machine empire in the Midwest.  Arthur J. O'Neill began as a salesman for dairy products in Wisconsin.  He met another man of considerable ambition, Robert Johns, who was determined to move from milk and cheese to more permanent merchandise.  Johns went to Chicago and began distributing chinaware, to be used as store premiums.  O'Neill followed in the footsteps of his mentor and started the O'Neill-James Company, also in Chicago, which was an advertising agency chiefly involved with premium promotions. 

O'Neill created the "Busy Bee" brand of talking machine, in order to distribute them to retail stores, which offered their customers a chance to own a talking machine in exchange for business loyalty.  

O'Neill allied himself with another maverick of the talking machine world, Hawthorne and Sheble Manufacturing Co. of Philadelphia and Bridgeport (CT).  H&S produced some of the most interesting, unusual, imaginative and innovative artifacts in the business.  Their brilliant engineer and designer Thomas Kraemer came up with a mind-boggling array of amazing mechanisms of which this machine is one!

The Busy Bee logo features an old-fashioned bee hive.  We are fortunate today to live in a world of previously unheard-of technology.  A friend of ours has devoted his retirement to producing hand-curated replicas of antique talking machine decals.  Here you see an example of his work, literally indistnguihable from the original, and applied UNDER the finish, precisely like the originals of the period.

The CHESTNUT wood of cabinet is a true American Fantasy.  And in this image we highlight the original winding crank and original soundbox (needlehead).  Note the diaphragm, painted to match the horn -- this highly-advanced soundbox features the patented aluminum diaphragm of Edwin H Mobley, another American original and brilliant innovator such as Arthur J O'Neill.   H&S was a Petri Dish of ideas and innovation that the megalithic Victor and Columbia could barely imagine.