Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

As modern wants and tastes developed and music became a science the demands of the nineteenth century were met by a Helmholtz, who discovered and explained the laws of harmony, and by many ingenious manufacturers, who so revolutionised the pianoforte action, and the action of musical instruments constructed on these principles, that their predecessors would hardly be recognised as prototypes.

The story of the piano, that queen of musical instruments, involves the whole history of the art of music. Its evolution from the ancient harp, gleaned by man from the wind, “that grand old harper, who smote his thunder harp of pines,” is too long a story to here recite in detail. It must suffice to say, it started with the harp, in its simplest form, composed of a frame with animal tendons stretched tight thereon and twanged by the fingers. Then followed strings of varied length, size, and tension, to obtain different tones, soon accompanied by an instrument called the plectrum—a bone or ivory stick with which to vibrate the strings, to save the fingers. This was the harp of the Egyptians, and of Jubal, “the father of all such as handle the harp and the organ,” and half-brother of Tubal Cain, the great teacher “of every artificer in brass and iron.” Then the harp was laid prostrate, its strings stretched over a sounding board, and each held and adapted to be tightened by pegs, and played upon by little hammers having soft pellets or corks at their ends. This was the psaltery and the dulcimer of the Assyrians and the Hebrews.

The Greeks derived their musical instruments from the Egyptians, and the Romans borrowed theirs from the Greeks, but neither the Greeks nor the Romans invented any.

Then, after fourteen or fifteen centuries, we find the harp, both in a horizontal and an upright position, with its strings played upon by keys. This was the clavicitherium. In the sixteenth century came the virginal, and the spinet, those soft, tinkling instruments favoured by Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, and which, recently brought from obscurity, have been made to revive the ancient Elizabethan melodies, to the delight of modern hearers. These were followed in the seventeenth century by the clavichord, the favourite instrument of Bach. Then appeared the harpsichord, a still nearer approach to the piano, having a hand or knee-worked pedal, and on which Mozart and Handel and Haydn brought out their grand productions. The ancient Italian cembello was another spinet.

Thus, through the centuries these instruments had slowly grown. By 1711 in Italy, under the inventive genius of Bartolommeo Cristofori of Florence, they had culminated in the modern piano. The piano as devised by him differed from the instruments preceding it chiefly in this, that in the latter the strings were vibrated by striking and pulling on them by pieces of quills attached to levers and operated by keys, whereas, in the piano there were applied hammers in place of quills.

In the 1876 exhibition at Philadelphia, a piano was displayed which had been made by Johannes Christian Schreiber of Germany in 1741.

Then in the latter part of the eighteenth century Broadwood and Clementi of London and Erard of Strasburg and Petzold of Paris commenced the manufacture of their fine instruments. Erard particularly made many improvements in that and in the nineteenth century in the piano, its hammers and keys, and Southwell of Dublin in the dampers.

By them and the Collards of London, Bechstein of Berlin, and Chickering, Steinway, Weber, Schomacher, Decker and Knabe of America, was the piano “ripened after the lapse of more than 2,000 years into the perfectness of the magnificent instruments of modern times, with their better materials, more exact appliances, finer adjustments, greater strength of parts, increase of compass and power, elastic responsiveness of touch, enlarged sonority, satisfying delicacy, and singing character in tone.”

A piano comprises five principal parts: first, the framing; second, the sounding board; third, the stringing; fourth, the key mechanism, or action, and fifth, the ornamental case. To supply these several parts separate classes of skilled artisans have arisen, the forests have been ransacked for their choicest woods, the mines have been made to yield their choicest stores, and the forge to weld its finest work. Science has given to music the ardent devotion of a lover, and resolved a confused mass of more or less pleasant noises into liquid harmonies. In 1862 appeared Helmholtz’s great work on the “Law and Tones and the Theory of Music.” He it was who invented the method of analysing sound. By the use of hollow bodies called resonators he found that every sound as it generally occurs in nature and as it is produced by most of our musical instruments, or the human voice, is not a single simple sound, but a compound of several tones of different intensity and pitch; all of which different tones combined are heard as one; and that the difference of quality or timbre of the sounds of different musical instruments resides in the different composition of these sounds; that different compound sounds contain the same fundamental tone but differently mixed with other tones. He explained how these fundamental and compound tones might be fully developed to produce either harmonious or dissonant sensations. His researches were carried farther and added to by Prof. Mayer of New Jersey. These theories were practically applied in the pianos produced by the celebrated firm of Steinway and Sons of New York; and their inventions and improvements in the iron framing, in laying of strings in relation to the centre of the sounding-board, in “resonators” in upright frames, and in other features, from 1866 to 1876, produced a revolution in the art of piano making.

If the piano is properly the queen of musical instruments, the organ may be rightly regarded, as it has been named, “King in the realm of music.” It is an instrument, the notes of which are produced by the rush of air through pipes of different lengths, the air being supplied by bellows or other means, and controlled by valves which are operated by keys, and by which the supply of air is admitted or cut off.