The Artifact: The Walking Stick Fiddle

recommend a visit. The museum features thousands of musical instruments from all around the world to illustrate the rich diversity of musical instrument design and innovation, as well as the universality of music, and via a headset and video displays all over the place, you get to see and hear many of these instruments in their traditional use, from Polynesian nose flutes to DJ Cubert's custom QFO turntable mixer. There's

a little something in there for everybody. I snapped numerous photos and took several notes for possible artifact episodes here on the show, and today I want to talk about the spatzerstt Geika, a late nineteenth century walking stick fiddle for Machnor Kirkeen in Saxony, Germany. This is a famous musical instrument making region, so feel free to look up images of the cane, but I'm going to go ahead

and describe it for you here as well. A short wooden walking stick with a small, functional four string fiddle built into one side of it. There's also room for a fitted bow with which to play it. Now. I wondered at the time, as I was looking at this in the museum if there was some sort of panel that could cover up or even hide the fiddle portion of the cane. And while there wasn't such a panel on display at the Musical Instrument Museum, subsequent research revealed

that such panels existed. So yes, you could have a completely hidden fiddle in your cane. So what was the point of all of this? Was it to sneak fiddles into places where music was banned? There some sort of secret musical spy war going on. Well, I'll refer you back to a previous artifact episode I recorded on gadget canes.

As Michelle Debchak explored in a twenty seventeen Mental Floss article, you can find various antique walking sticks and canes with all manner of special gadgety features, ranging from possibly practical to somewhat ridiculous. So there's a nineteenth century cane with

a coin weighing gadget built into the handle. There's a magic lantern projector cane, a cider press walking stick, an architect's cane with drafting tools hidden inside, a spy camera from the nineteen eighties that fits in a cane, a nineteenth century cane containing a miniature croquet set, a microscope cane,

and even a nineteenth century eagle headed crossbow cane. I believe there's also a spitting cane that naturally reminds one of the gimmick umbrellas favored by the batman villain the Penguin. So all of these gadget canes most clear novelties. They extended from the popularity of cane swords and swordsticks in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in Europe. The basic appeal of a hidden blade is of course understandable and to our modernized hey, is there anything cooler than a cane sword?

I mean, I grew up watching Sherlock Holmes, and when they busted out the cane swords, I got really excited, But the popularity of sword canes at the time actually had to do with just how uncool openly carrying a sword had become in polite society. So basically the message became, hey, by all means, carry a lethal blood letting weapon, but be a gentleman about it and hide it away in

a nice walking stick. Then, as sword canes became fashionable, the idea of hiding various other gadgets and curios in a cane became the fat It was no longer about hiding anything or even remotely being practical. In many case, says gadget canes were just a curious luxury, and we see that reflected in the musical instrument cane as well. According to the Musical Instrument Museum, the walking stick fiddle was more visually impressive than musically gratifying, and this was

largely due to its small sound box. Its maximum volume was fittingly low for such a stealthy stringed instrument, but again this was more fashion accessory than practical musical instrument. Tune in for additional episodes of the Artifact, the Monster Fact or Animalia Stupendium each week, and Hey go back into the audio archives for Stuff to Blow your Mind

wherever you get your audio podcasts. If you want to hear more about gadget canes and how Benjamin Franklin carried one with oil inside of it, and how one factors into the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and as always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.