Sarrusophone

From Oddwinds

The sarrusophone (Category 1) was patented in 1856 Pierre-Louis Gautrot; he is said to have named it after a bandmaster named Sarrus who had given him the idea. (This according to the article by Joppig; the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians says Sarrus was the inventor, and Gautror manufactured it.) It is a double reed conical bore instrument, made of metal, with a smaller taper than a saxophone; it was intended as a substitute for the oboe and the bassoon in military bands. It never achieved much popularity, although the contrabass sarrusophone was for a while sometimes used in orchestral music until Heckel's improved contrabassoon displaced it.

The fingering is so similar to that of the saxophone that Sax sued.

Gautrot made sarrusophones in nine sizes including

Sopranino in Eb

Soprano in Bb

Alto in Eb

Tenor in Bb

Baritone in Eb

Bass in Bb

Contrabass in Eb, C, and Bb

Sarrusophones are very rare instruments, but they still have a few players. Some of them use a modified single reed sax mouthpiece instead of the double reed; this makes the instrument into something like a sarrusophone-shaped sax -- which is fairly close to what a tubax is, isn't it?

If you can have a sarrusophone-shaped sax, can you imagine a sax-shaped sarrusophone? You don't have to. It exists, and it's called a rothphone.

[edit] Sarrusophone Makers

On their web site, Orsi claims they'll make sarrusophones of any size from soprano to (Eb) contrabass by special order. (These were in their catalog in 1937; see page reproduction in Joppig's article.)