G'day Nerd,

"... I wonder if this the "missing link" ..."

No! Melodeon is good name ... and, long before ®, ©, &c got used by a lot of different people for different instruments.

The direct ancestor of the various windchamber /keyboard /free reed organs seems to have been the Melophone ... a really weird, French (need we say more ... ) device that could be best described as a free reed vielle or 'hurdy gurdy'. It was shaped like a fat, deep guitar, pumped with a stirrup at the bottom end, instead of a crank and had fingerboard button-keys connected by a mess of piano wire.

One of the partners in the firm (Brown et Cierle, Rue des Fosses, Paris ... ?) took along hard look at it, around 1850 (20 years after the button accordion /melodeon was 'perfected') and decided that it would be a bloody sight simpler to sit the bellows and windchamber above a treadle, and play the thing with organ keys.

The various reed organs all came in a rush after that ... and the American use of Melodion was for a fairly small one - aka 'lap organ' - that appealed in the pioneering areas, being relatively portable and amenable to music-readers that played piano or organ. What it probably did spawn was the first piano accordions, as the work on piano keyboard versions of the accordion seems to have started, in Paris, at much this time.

Regards,

Bob Bolton