History of the manufacture

Benoît Paulis started his apprenticeship at the church organ company « la Manufacture d'orgues église Thomas »in Belgium. Later, he completed this apprenticeship specialising in barrel organs and mechanical music instruments.

Soon afterwards he began his work for the “Invisible Musicians” exhibition. “Invisible Musicians” is a collection of 260 pieces of mechanical music instruments which travel around the world for exhibition. Benoît was in charge of the setup, the maintenance, the taking down and the transport preparation of the exhibition. He has already travelled to Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Spain, Portugal and Mexico with this exhibition. The collection includes street organs, dancing organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes, automatons, phonographs and a great variety of mechanical music instruments. Being the Technical Supervisor of this collection, Benoît had the pleasure to restore most of them.

Besides the restoration, Benoit had also designed, developed and manufactured his own instruments (street and fair organs) since several years. These instruments were sold under the brand name of “Invisible Musicians”. Within the same context, he had also developed several individual pieces of electric and mechanical automatons.

It is with these experiences that he had decided to open his own workshop in the Belgian Ardennes, to continue to build instruments under the name of “Pauliphonic”. Besides building new instruments for clients, including Belgian gypsies, amateurs and collectors, Pauliphonic also exports these new instruments alone with its know-how in the restoration abroad.