[Stephen]

Hello to you all,
I’m new here, just registered.
I have been playing chromatic button accordion for 20 years, and also classical guitar. I recently (since 2012) picked up the melodica, because I like small and tiny music instruments.

There is an interesting patent online (see “Google books”):
Keyboard for musical instruments
US 2701498 A
http://www.google.ca/patents/US2701498

This is a very interesting document to read. You can view 2 technical drawings of these “melodica” types, one is unisonoric (blowing only), the other is a bisonoric (blowing + sucking air) prototype from the 1950s.
The Original inventors had a 4 row chromatic layout in thoughts (Janko style).

I suppose the Original patent text is in German, this is some robotic English translation, very difficult to read.
If anyone has got the Original German patent text online, I would like to see it.

greetings,
Stephen