This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

I want you to imagine a world where you can just invent a musical instrument.

I don't mean when you were a kid and you put some rubber bands on a tissue box.

I mean you come up with a new instrument almost from scratch and then watch as that instrument gets taken up and played in nearly every

marching band, jazz band, and high school music classroom across the country.

There actually was a time where this kind of thing happened.

That's reporter Jay Coburn.

In the 19th century, Western Europe saw an explosion of instrument innovation, where the entire landscape of instrumentation

was shifting, and where there was money to be made if your improvements caught on with the public.

This is when many of the instruments we know today reached their modern forms.

Trumpets had been around since Roman times, but in the 19th century, they took on the

valved form we know today, and flutes went from being conical wooden instruments to metal cylinders.

But one of the greatest innovations to come out of this time was the saxophone.

The saxophone wasn't an improvement on a previous instrument. It was a brand new invention,

a hybrid of brass and woodwind that not only managed to secure a spot in the musical canon,

but also went on to change American music forever. Its design came from the mind of a brash young

entrepreneur. His name, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Sacks.

Adolf Sacks was born in Dinole, Belgium, in 1814.

His full name was actually Antoine Joseph Sacks, but at the time Adolf wasn't, you know,

taken. So he went by that instead.

It's difficult not to remember him as this romanticised figure.

...