For all his shrewd business sense, Maelzel failed to protect his five-year patent of 1815. How this came to be is lost to time. Most likely Maelzel was simply caught up with a variety of pursuits, whether building or repairing automatons or barnstorming with his various mechanical devices. By now the metronome’s day-to-day business affairs were being overseen by Jean Wagner, Maelzel’s Parisian manufacturer, so perhaps each man assumed the other would follow up with the work of reviewing and renewing the patent. Regardless, the patent expired in 1820, paving the way for developments that were to eventually take musical timekeeping into the modern age. In 1825, the year Maelzel set sail for America with the Turk, an Amiens clockmaker by the name of Bien-aimé Fournier—sometimes referred to simply as Bienaimé—took advantage of the lapse and filed a patent for a design of his own.

That November Bienaimé was granted a five-year patent— no. 1813—for his métronome perfectionné. As opposed to Maelzel’s streamlined pyramid design, Bienaimé’s metronome took the form of a rectangular box that featured a dial on the front, calibrated from 30 to 208, and a collapsible pendulum that extended through the top of the box (fig. 15.1). While Bienaimé’s mechanics revealed his watchmaking expertise—his pendulum, for instance, was regulated by a fusée, a cone-shaped device incorporated into clocks and watches to help regulate the force of the mainspring as it wound down—the “perfected” element of Fournier’s patent referred to the device’s ability to be programmed for a variety of meters, including duple, triple and compound, such as 6/8. Furthermore, a bell, rather than percussive clicks, marked off the various beats of each measure, with the first beat of each bar sounding louder than those that followed. The device’s user would never be in doubt as to which signal indicated the downbeat.

In time, Wagner began manufacturing a similar bell model for Maelzel, though neither the Maelzel or Bienaime versions would endure, probably on account of their respective cost and complexity.