Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/495

 The piano-forte was invented by Bartolommeo Cristofori, a harpsichord-maker of Padua, Italy, who exhibited four instruments in 1709. The honor was formerly claimed for Marius, a French maker, who produced a piano in 1710; while German writers maintained that Schroeter, of Dresden, was the initiator of the instrument. The earliest date ascribed to the latter's achievement, however, is 1711. During the present century, however, an Italian document was discovered, written by Marchese Scipione Maffei, a Florentine scholar, in 1711, which testifies that Bartolommeo Cristofori, of that city, exhibited four pianos in 1709, which statement was originally published in the Giornale in that year, accompanied by a diagram of Cristofori's action principle, employing hammers, which constituted the chief difference betwenbetween [sic] the harpsichord and the piano.

In Maffei's writings Cristofori's name is given as "Cristofali," but this is proved to be an error, because inscriptions upon existing piano-fortes give the name as "Cristofori."

Father Wood, an English monk, living at Rome, is also said to have made a piano-forte similar to Cristofori's in 1711, which he exhibited in England, where it attracted much notice. Cristofori did not remain idle after introducing his first instrument. He became prominently known as a maker, but died in 1731, comparatively poor. Two piano-fortes by Cristofori, at present in Florence, dated 1720 and 1726, show that he anticipated the principles of an improved action, and many other points of equal importance in the structure and acoustics of the instrument. One of these is illustrated in Fig. 6. All authorities admit that he was a great figure and a genius of no common order.

England, backward in the production of musical creators or adjuncts to the art in the past, contributed nothing of consequence to supplant the harpsichord, which instrument was largely imported, until the middle of the last century, when Burckhardt Tschudi, a Swiss, settled in London. Tschudi subsequently engaged in the manufacture of piano-fortes, and incidentally founded