HIstorico-philosphocal Musings

My first, abortive, excited foray into restoration, has, so to speak, set me aback, a bit.

This one job, the damper felts, is not going to be the work of an afternoon, as with a modern piano, with standardized, rectilinear felts, that can be glued onto a flat damper head surface.

This is an antique instrument. It is close to 150 years old. It was built by hand, in a "new", "modern" factory in New Haven, Connecticut, around 1867. The factory made all its parts, from casting the frame, to cutting the wood action parts. I don't know if they pressed their own felt. Probably they contracted it. New England at the time was the major industrial manufactory for textiles and fabrics.

This was the post-war period when the war time industrialists were converting to peace time production, expanding west with the railroads and the civilizing mission. A number of investors came to Frederick Mathushek with the idea of starting a company to produce his designs. Mathushek was a German immigrant, who was highly regarded as a piano engineer. According to some accounts he invented overstringing, although I guess the Steinway Company first used it in production models..
Mathushek was well known as a designer of scales, that is balancing the interacting factors of length, weight and tension of the sequential strings, to produce the best sound, in a given wooden box.
Pianos produce sound when hammers hit the strings, and the strings vibrate. If you used the same weight of strings from top to bottom, the piano would have to be forty feet long, for the bass strings. If you used the same wound strings from bottom to top, the short strings would be too thick and heavy to vibrate at all.
And if you used the same string length from bottom to top, and tuned them by tightening them, like with a rubber band, you would have to pull the top strings so tight, they would break.

So, Mathushek designed a couple of square pianos for production. He designed the Orchestral Grand, which was a standard square grand, over six feet by four feet, and seven and a half octaves.

He also designed the Colibri Model, which this one is. It is a smaller instrument, with three fewer keys at the bottom end, saving about a foot of length in the instrument.

He opened the factory in New Haven in 1866. I have seen a catalogue from 1871, and all the instruments have fancy french legs. I searched for a long time until I found a picture of one with octagonal legs like mine, with the note that those legs went out of style after 1867. And since my serial number is 3003, I am venturing to date my instrument to 1867 or 1868 at the latest. Paul Robinson of Acme Piano Company in San Diego, want to put it a year or so later. I don't know how many instruments they produced in a year. More than a thousand? More than three a day? Somehow that doesn't seem likely. Who knows? If anyone has any information, let me know.

So, back to philosophico- part. I am only gradually beginning to grok the fullness of my instrument. It is a beautiful piece of 19th Century machinery. The cabinet is subdued, not extravagant as American Victorian furniture, and pianos, often were. The machine part, the action and the frame, are very elegantly designed. For instance, the damper assembly has lifters for each individual set of strings. But since the strings are overstrung, that is, the bass strings cross over the treble strings, there is a space of about six inches along the damper assembly where there are no strings to damp. Even so, Mathushek designed his assembly with six dummy damper arms to fill in the space. They lift when the damper pedal is depressed, and from the appearance, you would never know there is a gap in the line. Instead, you see an assembly with an attractive curve, and elegant long parallel arms.

So there is a design aesthetic going on here, as well. As I begin to understand the design and the mechanism, and compare it to modern instruments, I begin to understand the mind of the designer. This instrument has all the parts of any piano, but they are completely idiosyncratic, and I will have to figure out their quirks in order to restore this instrument to even 75 or 80% of its original musicality.