This is a close-up photo of the bow in a violin orchestrion. The bow is circular and spins around a set of violins. The violins are dipped outward to bring the strings in contact with the bow.

Look at all of those tiny knots! To make the bow circular, the strands have to be attached to the circle in short arcs.

There are more (amazing) pics of the whole mechanism in the Flickr stream here.

You can see a similar mechanism at work in this video.

(via the Mechanical Music group on Flickr)