Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/500

 standpoint of the European climate as well as the demands of the limited compass then known. Allen and Thoms later on improved upon their first patent, but not before they had been anticipated in this country by Alpheus Babcock, a piano-maker of Boston, whose invention Jonas Chickering subsequently perfected. Probably it was the obvious inability of London-made pianos to stand our climate, or the intrinsic defects in the system of case-building then in vogue, which attracted the attention of American piano-makers as early as 1790, when cases were put together with screws instead of glue in Philadelphia; anyway, it has long been a subject of pardonable pride to American piano-makers to know that the problem referred to was solved in this country.



In 1775 John Behrent, of Philadelphia, announced that "he had finished an extraordinary instrument by the name of the piano-forte in mahogany, in the manner of the harpsichord." This was probably the first piano made in America. James Julian came forward in 1784, when the Revolutionary War had just been concluded, and advertised the great "American piano-forte of his own invention." In 1789 a piano-forte made by George Ulshofer, a German musician and musical instrument maker and repairer, was exhibited by him in Corre's City Tavern, New York. Some time before this year Charles Albrecht began making pianos in Philadelphia, many notable specimens of which exist to-day. One stands in the Art Rooms of the Philadelphia Historical Society, dated 1789, and another was presented by the late Mr. Drexel to the New York Museum of Art.