So much of todays music is based on the concept of sampling. Modern keyboards rely heavily on sampling technologies. It's easy for us to think of it as an exclusively digital technique and fairly recent phenomena. The truth is that sampling goes back to the 40's and was originally an analogue tape technique. Harry Chamberlin invented the process and produced the first sampler, the Chamberlin, in 1946. About 100 of the instruments were produced in 1950's. They proved to be reliability problems and maintenance hogs. The history gets a little muddled at this point with the Chamberlin's main salesman (a former window washer) named Bill Fransen inking a production agreement with some brothers named Bradley in the UK that owned a tape head manufacturing business. They seemed to be under the impression that Bill Fransen was the inventor and Harry Chamberlin was unaware of the deal. A business venture named Mellotronics was formed and UK production began. It did not take long for this to come to the attention of Harry Chamberlin and he flew to the UK to investigate.