The first to see the importance of iron combined with wood (ulti mately almost supplanting it) in pianoforte framing was a native of England and a civil engineer by profession, John Isaac Hawkins, known as the inventor of the ever-pointed pencil. He was living at Philadelphia, U.S.A., when he invented and first produced the familiar upright pianoforte—"portable grand" as he then called it. He patented it in America, his father, Isaac Hawkins, taking out the patent for him in England in the same year, 1800.
There had been upright grand pianos as well as upright harpsi chords, the horizontal instrument being turned up upon its wider end and a keyboard and action adapted to it. William Southwell, an Irish piano-maker, had in 1798 tried a similar experiment with a square piano, to be repeated in later years by W. F. Collard of London ; but Hawkins was the first to make a piano with the strings descending to the floor, the keyboard being raised, and this, although at the moment the chief, was not his only merit. He anticipated nearly every discovery that has since been introduced as novel. His instrument is in a complete iron frame, inde pendent of the case; and in this frame, strengthened by a system of iron resistance rods combined with an iron upper bridge, his sound-board is entirely suspended. An apparatus for tuning by mechanical screws regulates the tension of the strings, which are of equal length throughout. The action, in metal supports, antici pates Wornum's in the checking, and still later ideas in a con trivance for repetition. Southwell appears to have been one of the first to profit by Hawkins's ideas by bringing out the tall cabi net pianoforte, with hinged sticker action, in 1807. All that he could, however, patent in it was the simple damper action, turn ing on a pivot to relieve the dampers from the strings. The next steps for producing the short or cottage upright piano were taken by Robert Wornum, who in 1811 produced a diagonally, and in 1813 a vertically, strung instrument. Wornum's improved crank action (fig. 23) was not complete until 1826, when it was pat ented for a cabinet piano ; but it was not really introduced until three years later, when Wornum applied it to his little "piccolo." The principle of this centred lever check action was introduced into Paris by Pleyel and Pape, and thence into Germany and America. (Pleyel exhibited a small upright piano in Paris in 1827, but Pierre Erard did not turn his attention to upright pianos until 1831.) Early in the 19th century William Allen, a young tuner in the employ of the Stodarts, devised a metal system of framing in tended primarily for compensation, but soon to become, in other hands, a framing for resistance. His idea was to meet the diver
gence in tuning caused in brass and iron strings by atmospheric changes by compensating tubes and plates of the same metals, guaranteeing their stability by a cross batoning of stout wooden bars and a metal bar across the wrest-plank. Allen consulted Stodart's foreman, Thom; and Allen and Thom patented the invention in January 182o. The firm of Stodart at once acquired the patent.
We now arrive at an important epoch in pianoforte construc tion—the abolition of the wooden construction in favour of a combined construction of iron and wood, the former material gradually asserting pre-eminence. Allen's design is shown in fig. 24. The long bars are really tut. es fixed at one end only; those of iron lie over the iron or steel wire, while those of brass lie over the brass wire, the metal plates to which they are attached being in the same correspondence. At once a great advance was made in the possibility of using heavier strings without danger to the durability of the case and frame. In 1821, a fixed iron string-plate, the invention of one of Broadwood's workmen, Samuel Herve, was applied to one of the square pianos of that firm. The great advantage in the fixed plate was a more even resistance to the tension of the strings and the reduction of their length behind the bridge. Long iron resistance bars were experi mented on as substitutes for the wooden bracing by Joseph Smith in 1798; but to James Broadwood belongs the credit of trying them first above the sound-board in the treble part of the scale in 1808, and again in 1818; he did not succeed, however, in fixing them properly. Sebastian and Pierre Erard seem to have been first in the field in 1823 with a complete system of nine resistance bars from treble to bass ; with a simple mode of fastening them through the sound-board to the wooden beams beneath. James Broadwood, by his patent of 1827, claimed the combination of string-plate and resistance bars, which was clearly the completion of the wood and metal instru ment, differing from Allen's in the resistance being fixed. Broad wood left the bass bars out, but added a fourth bar in the middle to the three in the treble he had previously used. But the weight of the stringing was always in creasing, and a heavy close cop per covering of the bass strings had become general. The resist ance bars were increased to five, six, seven, eight and, as we have seen, even nine, according to the ideas of the different English and French makers who used them in their pursuit of stability.