SAXOPHONE

The saxophone was invented by Adolphe Sax. Adolphe Sax was born in 1814 in Dinant, Belgium. He frequently appears on lists of famous Belgians, so much so that Belgium recently released a postage stamp bearing his likeness. In some circles, his is the only name on lists of famous Belgians. The Belgians who maintain such lists usually choose to ignore the observation that their most noteworthy countryman didn't actually become a household name until some time after he'd split for Paris in 1841.
Adophe Sax, like his father Charles Joseph Sax, was a career instrument maker. He'd patented several innovations upon traditional wind instruments by the age of twenty. His first successful instrument, the Saxhorn, was released shortly after he'd relocated to France. It wasn't an entirely new creation, being essentially a bugle with valves. Saxhorns are still played as band instruments in some quarters, and used as plant stands in others.

Saxophones built by Adolphe Sax.

Sax created the saxophone around 1846. He spent the rest of his life teaching at the Paris Conservatoire — among other things, providing instruction in playing sax. He died in 1894.
Actually, he experienced a few inconsequential financial ripples — the odd bankruptcy, exile to London, screaming creditors and such, and he died largely penniless after spending much of his later life defending his patents — but let us not dwell upon such things. His creation is still played a century and a half later, and not infrequently nailed to the walls of trendy coffee houses by aging beatniks who sell espresso for six dollars a cup. Not a lot of instrument makers can make the same claim, and still fewer employees of the Belgian post office.
A contemporary of Adolphe Sax, Louis Hector Berlioz, the French composer responsible for Symphonie Fantastique and Grande Messe des Morts — the latter admittedly a pretty depressing requiem that could drive clowns to thoughts of suicide — said of the saxophone: "Its principal merit in my view is the varied beauty of its accent, sometimes serious, sometimes calm, sometimes impassioned, dreamy or melancholic, or vague, like the weakened echo of an echo, like the indistinct plaintiff moans of the breeze in the woods and, even better, like the mysterious vibrations of a bell, long after it has been struck; there does not exist another musical instrument that I know of that possesses this strange resonance, which is situated at the edge of silence." Clearly, he hadn't been required to share a flat with somebody learning to play one.