Adolphe Sax’s 201st birthday celebrated with a Google doodle

Adolphe Sax certainly did, and being both a talented musician and the enterprising man that he was, he started tinkering and endeavoured to fill it. The result was the iconic, honey-toned instrument still bearing his name: “the saxophone”, Google said on its Doodle website.

With a brass body and woodwind mechanics, the sax occupied the “wonderfully smoky middle” ground between the two frequency ranges.

This final Doodle is not a real instrument that Sax invented, but a quirky take on the convoluted and intricate designs he brought to life – called the “Googlehorn”. The saxophone is a metal single-reed instrument, with a conical bore. Two octave key vents allow the instrument to overblow to a higher register at the octave.

Born in Belgium on 6th November 1814, Antoine-Joseph “Adolf” Sax, who began to make his own instruments at an early age, also invented the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba. A hybrid of the brass and woodwind families, the instrument is the perennial Cinderella of serious music.

According to Google, one Doodle wouldn’t be enough to showcase how creative and “inventive” Sax was, so the artist Lydia Nichols designed five different Doodles, each highlighting a different instrument invented by Sax. Adolphe Sax improved upon the design of the bass clarinet, his first important invention, which he got patented at age 24. He died in 1894 in Paris and was buried at the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris.

Google has gone all out with today’s doodle to celebrate his work.