Diedrich Nikolaus Winkel (Lippstatt, Germany, 1773 - Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1826) was an extraordinary craftsman and inventor, but a lousy salesman. He came to live in Amsterdam in 1800 as a producer of some very fine mechanical musical instruments. He will be remembered by two inventions: the aforementioned Metronome and the famous Componium.
In 1814 Winkel made the first usable metronome by adding two weights to a pendulum: a bigger one below and a lighter slideable one on the other side. All other attempts before to make an audible time-measurer stranded on the necessity of making pendulums of more than two meters length for slow rhythms.
The original of the first metronome can be seen in the Municipal Museum in The Hague, Netherlands, and it can be seen there that the modern construction is still almost the same, albeit somewhat smaller in dimensions.
The German inventor, instrument maker and music teacher Johann Nepomuk Maelzel saw the Metronome in 1816. He was a better salesman and may have had more contacts in the musical field of those days. He took the invention and took patents on it in London and Paris; that's why the machine still is depicted as "Maelzels Metronome" (M.M.)
The other important invention by Dirk Winkel is the Componium. This automatic organ is played by two separate barrels that are turning around simultaneously. The tunes on the barrels are arranged in such a way that pieces of a few musical measures are played by one of the barrels alternately. In between, a rather complicated mechanism decides which of the ten tunes of the other barrel will be played for the next few measures, thus giving thousands of combinations like a musical dice-game. The Componium, in a rather bad shape now, is in the collection of the Brussels Museum of Instruments.
Hans van Oost, Netherlands