Piano pedals (1) - the sustain pedal

 

As a couple of people have asked me recently, I thought it might be useful to run through a brief history of how the pedals on a piano evolved and the mechanics of how they work. This is the first in a planned series of three articles.

Two pedals or three?

The first question is - how many pedals does the typical piano have? The answer may depend on which part of the world you live in. In Europe, the great majority of older pianos will have only two pedals - only since around the 1970s and 80s has the middle pedal become commonplace on new models. On the other hand, in North America, I understand that three pedals is generally the norm, and the situation may vary in other parts of the world. In any case, almost any piano will have either two or three - a few historic instruments (typically from the 1860s or earlier) may have only one pedal (normally the sustain pedal); also in a very few cases there may be four or more (of which more in a later article).

The exact functions of pedals on an upright piano is typically different from a grand piano, and some uprights differ from each other, so to ease into the discussion I'll deal with the one pedal which does more or less the same thing on every piano, and is almost always located in the same place - it's the right-hand or sustain pedal.

The sustain pedal (right-hand pedal) - also called the damper pedal

When pianists talk about "using the pedal", it is the right-hand or sustain(-ing) pedal they normally mean. This has a similar function on more or less every instrument, which is to lift off all the felt dampers that prevent the strings from ringing on after being struck by the hammer. Because of this, the pedal is sometimes referred to as the damper pedal or the loud pedal, though the latter term is often held to be incorrect since it does not make the notes any louder; nor is it the pedal's particular purpose (it is often used in quiet passages). However, its use does change the timbre of a note when struck, as it allows the strings of the other notes to vibrate sympathetically. On some early pianos, the sustain pedal is the only pedal though it was not the first to be invented (that was the una corda, of which more in the second article).

The first maker known to have used the sustain pedal mechanism in essentially its current form was Johann Andreas Stein (1728-92), although his pianos featured knee pedals rather than the modern foot-operated ones. This was a development of an earlier idea by Gottfried Silbermann (1683-1753), but this earlier device was a hand stop, so could only be switched on and off whilst the piano was not being played. A picture of a Stein grand piano, with the knee pedal visible, can be seen on the Cobbe Collection website here:
http://www.cobbecollection.co.uk/collection/15-grand-piano/

John Broadwood in 1783 used the modern concept of the sustain mechanism operated by a foot pedal on his grand pianos, though this may have been used on some earlier English-made instruments.

How the sustain pedal works

Although this pedal has the same basic function on every piano, it actually works in a slightly different way depending upon the type of piano you have. 

Underdamper uprights (all modern and some older uprights)

All modern upright pianos and some older instruments have dampers that are located underneath and behind the hammers - this is called an "underdamper action". This picture shows the bass section of a Yamaha U1 - I have pressed the pedal down and as you can see, the dampers have come away from the strings (the position of the dampers is shown by the red arrows).

When the pedal is pressed, it moves a pivoted rod (usually wooden on older pianos, sometimes metal on newer ones) called a rocker, and this pushes up the pedal stick, normally at the left-hand side of the case.

This picture shows a typical arrangement of two pedals, the pedal rockers and pedal sticks on an older German-made upright piano. When the pedal is pressed down, the pedal bolts pull down the pedal rocker at the right-hand side - the left-hand side pivots up raising the pedal sticks (at the left side of the case).The rocker is returned to position by a spring.

The pedal stick engages with a hinged metal rod at the back of the dampers, called the damper lift rod, which pushes the tails of the dampers forwards and brings the heads away from the string.

This picture shows a modern Yamaha U1 action from the back, removed from the piano so you can see what is happening. The pedal stick comes up where my hand is and the rod (the end of which can be seen under the green arrow) moves the damper tail outwards, moving the head back from the string.

You will also note that the top notes (typically the top couple of octaves) on any piano will not have dampers, as they sustain for such a short while that damping is unnecessary.

The invention of underdampers goes back to 1829 when they were featured in an action design by the French piano makers Blanchet et Roller.

Overdamper uprights (some older pianos)

An 1890s German overstrung upright with overdampers

If your upright piano looks a bit like this with the top door removed, you have an overdamper model. Overdampers are very common in many European-made pianos from before the Second World War, but the design gradually disappeared over time and ceased to be made at all after about 1950 (outside Europe I believe they may be much less frequently-encountered). They can very easily be identified by the long wires at the front of the action which operate the dampers, located on a separate damper rail above the line of the hammers. Unlike the underdamper action, which relies on springs to push the dampers back on to the strings, the overdamper mechanism is gravitationally operated (there are often weights located in the wooden damper bodies). Please note however that some older pianos - including pre-1900 models - have the modern-style (underdamper) mechanism.

On these pianos, the dampers are normally lifted by a wooden or metal rail underneath the damper bodies - the blue arrow on the diagram shows the end of the damper lift rail and the top of the pedal stick (which is pushed up by the pedal). The damper body (the piece of wood connected to the top of the long wire) links to a right-angled wire that connects to the damper head.

There is some variation in these arrangements - a few (normally older) overdamper models have a spring-loaded damper rail which is pulled away from the strings, or a hinged rail which moves upwards with the pedal, drawing back the dampers in both cases.

Overdampers are similar to a design used by Robert Wornum in his patent for a "double action" in 1826, which is the basis for all modern upright actions. It appears that most English manufacturers used this design through the mid-nineteenth century, whereas some French makers used underdampers; quite a lot of German makers followed the English practice. From the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards until around 1950, overdampers were gradually phased out as more and more manufacturers switched over their action designs. However some noted makers (such as the German firm Blüthner) continued to use overdampers until relatively late on.

Grand pianos

On a grand piano, the dampers sit on top of the strings (except for a few older models that have them underneath) and are easily visible when the lid is raised. Each damper is connected to a wire, which goes through a hole in a piece of wood through the damper guide rail, and connects though a pivoting knuckle to the damper underlever, which is attached to a rail underneath the soundboard. Note that under normal circumstances these underlevers are difficult to see with the action inside the piano.

This arrangement is shown in the diagram below:

When the key is pressed down (the front of the key is off the right-hand end of this diagram), it pivots on the balance pin (coloured blue) and the back of the key is pushed upwards (red arrow). This will propel the hammer up toward the string, but the part we're interested in here is that the very back of the key (shown in red) will rise up and push up the damper underlever, so lifting the damper head (green) and felts from the string.

If the pedal is pressed, this typically connects to a metal strip that pushes up a dowel underneath the damper lift rail (shown in orange) - this raises all the damper underlevers and the dampers (green), regardless of whether the key is pressed down or not.

You will also note that in the grand action, the damper mechanism is effectively separate from the main action, which will be important in the next article!

When the sustain pedal isn't working

The pedal is extremely important for expression in many piano pieces - especially those from the romantic era - so pianist Eliane Rodrigues had to think on her feet when things went wrong during a performance in Rotterdam. Here's what happened when the piano had to be taken off-stage, using a descending trapdoor, and replaced:

The other pedals (left pedal and middle pedal, where there is one) will be covered in two further articles.

How to keep healthy, bright-eyed and slim

I remember that some years ago, there was a commonly available ointment called "Zam-Buk" - my granny would nearly always have a tin of it in the bathroom. It was a sort of green-coloured emollient that you could put on grazes or scratches. It used to come in tins that looked a bit like this:

The ointment is still marketed today in some other parts of the world, and you can still buy it here in Britain - except that it now comes in "heritage style" tins that mimic the original packaging of the late Victorian period. It turns out that Zam-Buk (the origin of the name is not quite clear) was produced by a company based in Leeds, called C E Fulford Ltd, established in the 1890s. By the 1950s, the factory was in Carlton Hill, just off Woodhouse Lane - however the building and almost everything around it was completely demolished in the 1960s. You can see a picture of it here.

My reason for mentioning this was that it brings me in a roundabout way to the fact that the Fulford company also marketed several other products - their other offerings included "Peps, for coughs, colds & bronchitis" and "Guy's Tonic, for indigestion and nerviousness."

Yet another product was Ven-Yusa, "the oxygen face cream". In an advertisement of 1917, the heading referred to "The Lady Conductor" and went on: "None of the War occupations of women call for more exposure to the elements than that of the lady conductor on tram or bus. Unless proper measures are promptly taken, a painful roughness and discolouration of the skin are bound to result." Well, whoever knew that being a clippie could be so hazardous! But never fear, because: "For this trouble, Ven-Yusa is the favourite application because it gives the skin an invigorating 'oxygen bath'."

If you are sensing a hint of late Victorian quackery at work in the background, you may have a point, as will be seen shortly. However, the particular product that I wanted to discuss here should be familiar to anyone living in York, and possibly quite a few of those who have visited. I refer, of course to "Bile Beans", another flagship product of the Fulford Company.

York's famous "Bile Beans" sign in Lord Mayor's Walk

This famous "ghost sign" was actually repainted by public subscription after the York Civic Trust raised £1,600 back in 2012. As a point of interest, I suspect that it probably dates from after the Second World War and possibly as late as the 1950s, since the style of the sign is consistent with the company's print advertising at that time; and who could forget the snappy injunction that Bile Beans - taken nightly, of course - keep you healthy, bright-eyed and slim.

There is a slightly darker history behind this, which has its origins back in the 1890s. Strange as it may seem now - even the name would probably be offputting to the modern customer - this was once a highly-popular and widely-advertised product. The Fulford Company was established by Charles Edward Fulford, a Canadian emigré born in 1870. By 1895, he was in Australia hawking around a medicinal concoction of questionable value, "Dr Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People" on behalf of his uncle, George Taylor Fulford. Working with a colleague, Ernest Gilbert, in 1897 he launched "Bile Beans for Biliousness", which proved so successful that in 1899 he came to Leeds to set up the manufacture and marketing of the same in Britain.

The back story behind the product - initially described as "Charles Forde's Bile Beans", was that Charles Forde, an Australian scientist, had scoured the outback for medicinal plants previously known only to the aborigines, before carefully distilling them into the formula for the incredible cure-all: bile beans. Unfortunately the reality was that "Charles Forde" was a figment of the imagination - except inasmuch as he was a thinly-disguised alter ego of Charles Fulford, who was neither Australian nor a scientist.

A great deal of money was spent on advertising: according to Wikipedia the company was spending as much as £60,000 (perhaps at least £5 million today) per annum on a whole variety of different forms of marketing, including wall signs, print advertising, door-to-door leaflets, free gifts, the "Bile Beans Cookbook" and later on a "Bile Beans Puzzle Book".  In fact, even as late as the 1950s, advertisements seem to have been widespread - for example, there are records of several "Bile Beans" signs in Leeds around that period. One of these, in Hunslet, still survives:

The 'other' Bile Beans sign in Hunslet, Leeds

Advertising blurb often contained anecdotes, endorsements and purported scientific research, such as "The Verdict of Science on Bile Beans" (an article from 1907), proclaiming: " 'We have satisfied ourselves that Bile Beans are of purely vegetable origin,' says that leading London scientific journal, 'Science Siftings.' 'Our laboratory experiments and practical tests have disclosed to us a valuable preparation... excellent for constipation and as a regulator of the liver and bile.' "

The verdict of the somewhat better-known "British Medical Journal" contrasted rather sharply with this: in an article entitled "Patent Medicines" of December 26th 1903, the ingredients were shown to be a concoction of items commonly found in chemists' shops of the time. The laxative effect was real enough due to the presence of aloin, though it would not now be considered safe due to its side effects. The article warned: "It would not be unfair to describe most of the preparations of the patent medicine vendors as quack remedies. The chief means by which patent medicines were found to succeed is persistent and audacious advertisement."

The company ran into trouble in 1905 after taking legal action against a chemist called George Davidson of Edinburgh, who started producing his own product called "Davidson's Bile Beans." The official records of the case note that: "The advertisements of the Bile Bean Company stated that the basis of their Bile Beans was an Australian herb discovered by Charles Forde, an eminent scientist. These statements and others in the advertisements were false." Lord Ardwall, the judge, stated: "There is no doubt in my mind that their business is based on fraud, impudence and advertisement." In the appeal case of the following year, Lord Kingsburgh the Lord Justice Clerk was even more explicit: "I agree with the Lord Ordinary [Lord Ardwall] in holding that the Complainers being engaged in perpetrating a deliberate fraud on the public, in describing and selling an article as being what it is not, cannot be listened to when they apply to a Court of Justice for Protection."

Despite this setback, it seems the public's enthusiasm for "Bile Beans" was scarcely dimmed. However, Charles Fulford did not enjoy the proceeds of his enterprise for very long - he died suddenly aged just 36 on a return visit to Australia, with "exhaustion" as the stated cause, leaving, by all accounts, an enormous fortune. At this point, his elder brother Frank Harris Fulford stepped in and took charge of the firm.

The Bile Bean March

This brings me to one of the Fulford Company's less orthodox forms of advertising. Frank Fulford's true interest in life was music - he was an accomplished viola player, having studied in Leipzig, and who was working as a music dealer in Canada. In 1898, he composed a jaunty piece called "The Bile Bean March", which could be obtained free by sending a letter of request to the Fulford Company's headquarters. The true objective, of course, was to obtain an address to which subsequent exhortations on the value of "Bile Beans" and other products could be sent.

A letter to the British Medical Journal from E P Edmonds of Aylesford near Maidstone in 1966 stated: "The account [referring to an article in a previous issue] of the piano teacher addicted to 'Bile Beans', prompted me to take a look at one of my prized possessions - a copy of the 'Bile Bean March'." The letter goes on to point out that "this moving melody has been 'rendered with immense success by leading artists & orchestras throughout Great Britain' [as stated on the front].

"Before propping this sheet on the piano we can read on the first page of 'One of the most miraculous cures of the century.'

" 'When ten doctors and infirmary staff have failed to do any good; when for four long years a young woman has been gradually sinking, when her own mother by sheer force of circumstances had to abandon all hope, nay, to go further and actually prepare her daughter's grave clothes, and in her mind to select the bearers for the last solemn ceremony, then it will be admitted such a case looks about as black as it possibly could.'

"Black indeed! But this young lady, Miss Annie Brook, was recommended Charles Forde's Bile Beans for Biliousness, and after taking five boxes she was completely cured. In a legally sworn statement she tells us that, 'My mother used to feel at me every five minutes to see if I was dead, for the doctors said I might go off at any minute'."

I have, courtesy of the National Library of Australia's online archive, managed to obtain a copy of "The Bile Bean March". As far as I can make out, there is no online recording of this piece anywhere. The full piece goes on for five pages, but I am able to present what is very possibly the internet premiere of the first movement of this piece below:

Frank Fulford went on to contribute much to the cultural life of the city of Leeds. In 1909, he moved into Headingley Castle (the building still stands but has now been converted into flats), and during his time there collected many pictures and interesting artefacts, and a fine collection of sheet music. Later on, he served for some years on the council's Art Gallery committee, and donated many items from his collections, including his sheet music which remains at Leeds University Library to this day. He died in 1943, still leaving a considerable fortune. It appears his personal generosity and good nature were well thought of in his lifetime and afterwards, but his true opinions on the nature of the remedies that brought him so much wealth are not recorded.

How to keep healthy, bright-eyed and slim

Personally, my advice would be:
1. Get your morning off to a good start by playing the invigorating strains of  the "Bile Bean March" on your piano.*
2. Stay well away from "Bile Beans" and other products of dubious medicinal value.

* Alternatively, you could enjoy listening to this ukulele ensemble from York, whose logo seems to have a distinct passing similarity to the iconic "Bile Beans" sign!

What is a piano tuner listening to when tuning?

All about beats

A piano tuner will explain that when tuning they are listening to "beats" - being able to recognize and correctly judge the speed of these is one of the key skills developed in the course of learning to tune. So I though it might be useful to put something on the blog about what these "beats" actually are, in physical terms, and why listening to these is an essential part of the process when tuning. To be a tuner you don't need the ability to hear low-flying aircraft, noises that only bats or dogs can normally hear, or strange mystical powers. What you do need to do over time is to train yourself to recognize particular sounds  within the large number of apparently random noises coming out of a piano.

Firstly, very few tuners have perfect (or absolute) pitch, namely the ability to recognize the pitch of a sound ("that's an F#") instantly - this is a rare gift even amongst musicians. It's very rare amongst tuners as well, and not always an advantage!

For the rest of us (and that includes me), to get a piano to pitch, it is necessary to tune the first string either to a tuning fork (the traditional way) or to an electronic tuner. Personally, I use an electronic tuner for the pitch of the first string only - everything is then tuned by ear relative to that first string. For that reason, a tuner needs to be able to recognize different musical intervals and have a good relative sense of pitch. Normally I use middle C as the reference point, but many tuners will use A instead.

The next thing is to get the two unison strings of middle C in tune with the first string.This is where the tuner needs to be able to recognize "beats" in the sound of two strings together, when one is slightly out of tune with the other. It would help at this point to explain why "beats" occur, and what actually causes these sounds in practice.

This graph represents a sound wave as a sine curve:
 

This is a simplified model - of course in practice the sound isn't a perfect sine wave, and the curve is simply a representation of compressions and rarefactions in the air itself - but it does help to illustrate how two sound waves combine together. This second graph shows the effect of two sound waves perfectly in tune with each other - one is coloured green and the other yellow, but you can't see the yellow one because it's covered by the green one. The red curve (of double the amplitude) is the combination of the two.

As you can see, the two sound waves just reinforce each other.

Now watch what happens if the green and yellow sound waves are at a slightly different frequency:

In this particular illustration, the yellow sound wave is at a higher frequency than the green sound wave; the ratio is 16:15 - this isn't typical of the kind of ratio you would normally be listening to as a tuner, but will do very nicely to illustrate the principle. The combination of these two sound waves gives the following result (red line):

You can see that the two waves start off in phase, so the combined sound wave is nearly double the amplitude; however, as the green and yellow waves diverge from each other, they start to cancel each other out, so the red wave goes almost down to nothing, then starts increasing in loudness again.

This graph shows the same pattern - this time I have increased the frequency of the green and yellow waves and the ratio is now 51:50. You can clearly see that the red wave - the result of addition of the green and yellow - shows a clear, regular "beating" pattern which is the consequence of wave interference. This is what a tuner is listening for when attempting to put the two strings in unison.

Here's the same graph except that I have now increased the frequency of the yellow wave again, so it's now in a ratio of 52:50 to the green one. As you can see, the "beat" is now faster - double what it was previously. This illustrates the important point that as two strings get further apart in frequency, the speed of beating increases until the strings are just obviously out of tune. The other thing to note is that the speed of beating tells the tuner how far away the two strings are from each other, but not whether the string being tuned is higher or lower than the reference string - that has to be worked out by listening to the speed of beats changing as the tuning pin is moved.

Obviously, the tuner's objective in this case is to try and get rid of the "beating" sound, which should put the two strings in tune. So this is fine for getting two strings perfectly into unison with each other, but that isn't good enough if we want to tune a whole piano - we need to be able to tune other intervals as well. In practice, a tuner will put in a "scale" or temperament octave - that is tuning every note in an octave around the middle of the piano and then work outwards in octave steps from there. I'm not going to deal with exactly how the scale octave is done now because it involves an understanding of musical temperament (in particular equal temperament, which is nearly always used in piano tuning) and in practice, this process involves putting in "beats" instead of just getting rid of them. I expect to return to these subjects in some future posts, but for now I'll deal with the simpler case of tuning an octave.

The first thing to understand is that two notes an octave apart should have a frequency ratio of 2:1, so the tuner will need to be able to hear the result if two notes are in a perfect octave or slightly out. For this reason, I've set up the graph to show the resulting pattern for an 81:40 ratio - i.e nearly an octave but not quite, to see what results. Although there is some kind of regular change in the wave pattern, there is no clear variation in amplitude (loudness) as with the case of the near-unison we looked at earlier. The bottom line, in fact, is that this does not produce any clearly discernible "beat" which is of use to the tuner; how, then, is it possible to hear when a octave is in tune?

Hearing the harmonics

What saves the day here is a property of a vibrating string fixed at both ends: as well as its "fundamental frequency" (i.e. the soundwave produced when it oscillates along its entire length), it also has separate vibrations through 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 of its length and so on. These are called upper harmonics or partials of each note, and help to give the tone of an acoustic piano its richness.

This is called the harmonic series. What this means is that if we look at a particular note (for example the C two octaves blow middle C), it is producing all the following sounds:

The fundamental frequncy: C two octaves below middle C
2nd harmonic: C one octave below middle C
3rd harmonic: G below middle C
4th harmonic: Middle C
5th harmonic: E above middle C
6th harmonic: G above middle C
7th harmonic: Doesn't quite correspond exactly, but close to Bb above middle C
8th harmonic: C above middle C

Yes! Really, all these noises are coming out of your piano when you play just the one note. In fact, the series goes on ad infinitum, but in practice the harmonics above the 8th are not really important for piano tuning and above about the 12th they are very weak indeed, to the point of being virtually undetectable. Also, a bass note will have more audible harmonics than one in the treble - the additional partials get progressively weaker the higher the note.

If you're interested in a longer explanation, there's one here:

How does this help the tuner? Well, if two notes an octave apart are being tuned, the second harmonic of the lower note should be at the same frequency as the note above, and thus produce a recognizable beat, exactly the same as a unison, if the notes are slightly out of tune; thus, the tuner is trying simply to remove the "beat" in exactly the same way as before.

So that's how an octave is tuned - for completeness, I should briefly add that when an octave is tuned on a piano, it's actually slightly wider than a theoretically perfect one. The reason for this is that the strings on a piano aren't "ideal strings", i.e. perfectly flexible; rather they have stiffness and this results in the upper harmonics being slightly sharp of where they ought to be. The technical name for this is "inharmonicity".

But that's enough for now - tying up some of the loose ends should provide topics for future posts!

Yorkshire Piano Makers (2): Waddington and Sons

Here's Stonegate - one of York's most picturesque ancient streets and a popular destination for visitors; but I wonder how many of the people walking past these picturesque shops realize that they were once the site of one of the largest piano factories outside London?

Below is a picture of Stonegate, from nearly the same place, some time around 1890. Across the street is the sign for "Boddy's Star Inn", now known as the "Olde Starre Inne" (there is still a sign in just the same place), but above and to the left of it, there is a sign saying "Waddington". In the 1901 edition of Kelly's directory for York, we find that Nos. 43, 44 and 45 Stonegate were occupied by "Waddington and Son, Pianoforte Manufacturer."

There was a varied list of other activities going on in Stonegate at the time including a cycle maker's, a wire worker, a dancing academy, an electrical engineer, a taxidermist, an antique dealer (then as now!), a fancy repository (roughly a high-class gift shop), a baker, a tailor, a dressmaker, a coal merchant, a watchmaker, a solicitor.... it seems you could get just about anything you might have wanted here at the time. However, such was the popularity of the piano in the period, apart from Waddington's there were two other shops in the street selling them as well - a Mr H Fordham and a Mrs E Bell, both on the opposite side. Both are described as "piano warehouses" so presumably they weren't actually making instruments, though they might well have been doing repairing and tuning work. York was certainly "piano city" at the time because Noyes and Son, piano dealers, could be found in Tower Street, and in Coney Street there was Gray and Sons piano warehouse, as well as a "pianoforte saloon" run by A Ramsden Ltd - though whether of the Wild West variety I cannot tell! (Ramsden crops up a little later in our story, as well).

York in fact has a history of strong connections with keyboard instrument manufacture dating back to the eighteenth century - Thomas Haxby of York (1729-1796) based at 28 Blake Street, produced organs, spinets, and latterly square pianos, which are considered some of the best made during the period. He even merits his own entry in Wikipedia.

It took a bit more work to unearth details about the business of Waddington and Sons, but "The History of Stonegate", by John Ward Knowles, from the York City Archives, offers some interesting insights. An earlier nineteenth-century piano maker in York was a Mr Marsh of Coney Street, who had been a former employee of the famous firm of Broadwood and Sons, but later took to becoming a dealer. Knowles says that "in 1838, William Alfred Waddington came to York and commenced in a small way to manufacture pianos, occupying some workshops behind the Star Inn." From this it can be gathered that he wasn't originally from York - in fact it appears from fragments of information on the internet that he was a native of Everton (Liverpool). Knowles tells us that he died in 1896 at the age of 79, which would put his year of birth as 1816 or 1817.

He was married to Mary Ann Waddington (nee Hunt) who was born in York - but intriguingly she again has a connection to the piano industry. According to Knowles, her (older) brother, Richard Hunt, was working as a hairdresser at No.2 Stonegate in 1840, but by 1843 he had adopted music as a profession and had moved just around the corner to 23 Blake Street, "where he had opened out a musical instrument department and commenced the manufacture of pianos." Whether it was Waddington who inspired Hunt to start off in the piano trade or vice versa is unclear. Apparently in 1851, Hunt produced a "new shaped instrument which appeared externally to resemble a centre table  for a drawing room with  pedestal feet and which he had exhibited at the Great Exhibition of that year." However, by the 1860s he had moved to Scarborough as a hotel owner and was the founder in 1873 of the Scarborough South Cliff Tramway Company, which built the first ever funicular railway in Britain (it still operates today). Possibly he may have handed his residual piano business over to his brother-in-law.

Some more information appears in "A musical place of the first quality - a history of institutional music-making in York, 1550 - 1989", by David Griffiths. He notes that Waddington's took out an advertisement in the York Herald in 1862 thanking patrons for their business over the last fourteen years (implying establishment in 1848) but in the 1920s the firm claimed to have been established in 1838. Whatever the truth of the matter, the firm was reported as employing 135 to 150 people by the 1860s and by 1876 said in an advertisement that it had sold 10,000 instruments. Clearly if these statements are anything like correct then the firm must have been significant within the piano industry - for comparison, the famous London firm of Broadwood and Sons was employing perhaps 500 people at its peak during the late Victorian period. Thus, the claim to have been the "largest piano manufactory outside of London" in 1871 may not have been an enormous exaggeration. Despite this, the firm seems to have attracted very little attention from piano historians - it does not even merit a mention in the list in Alfred Dolge's "Pianos and their Makers" from 1910.

William Alfred Waddington, the firm's founder, seems to have been responsible for at least two patents: No.972 from 1st May, 1854, described as "Improvements in the construction of sounding-boards for pianofortes and other like stringed instruments", and No.3187 of 28th November 1862 "for an invention for Improvements in machinery for cutting wood." However, he also seems to have seen his fair share of legal actions of one kind or another; for example on 19th May 1862 he was granted a "deed of arrangement and composition" - which means an arrangement by a debtor to pay creditors a percentage of the money owed to them (7s 6d in the pound, in this particular case). The main creditor seems to have been the York Union Banking Company respresented by George Dodsworth - this company was established in 1833 (the "Railway King", George Hudson, was one of the original directors) and was eventually absorbed by Barclays in 1902.

Another intriguing snippet of information from the internet concerns a legal dispute in 1879 between William Alfred Waddington and Archibald Ramsden the same who had a "piano saloon" in Coney Street. Unfortunately the details of this action are not available online (only by ordering from the National Archives). However, the said Archibald Ramsden was a performer and impresario, born in 1835, who returned to his native city of Leeds in 1864 to open a shop selling pianos, harmoniums and sheet music (later there was also a shop in London). In fact, there is even a picture of his main showroom in Park Row, Leeds in an advert from the 1870s. Unfortunately this building (a stone's throw from City Square) is now demolished.

Some pianos were manufactured with the name "Archibald Ramsden", but as far as I can determine there is no record of Ramsden's having their own factory. This would not have been unusual at the time - in fact it was commonplace for music shops to have pianos made for sale under their own name by other manufacturers, rather like an "own brand" product. These were known as "stencil" pianos, a system that remained commonplace probably at least until the 1930s. It seems possible that Waddington's were supplying Ramsden with pianos, possibly under the Waddington name or possibly Ramsden's. Whatever the cause of the argument in 1879, it seems at least a distinct possibility that it was piano-related.

I decided to pop into York city centre on a Saturday afternoon to investigate the site of the Stonegate factory. The buildings in Stonegate were subsequently renumbered - I'm not sure exactly when this happened - but 43 and 44 Stonegate are now number 34, whilst 45 Stonegate is now number 32. These buildings are now occupied by the the "White Stuff" clothes shop and by Cath Kidston. The staff in both shops were kind enough to allow me to take photos inside the buildings.

Here's a picture of the front of the two buildings as seen from Stonegate. According to the register of historic buildings in York Library, the property on the right (No.34) was built around 1730; it was originally two houses (hence it originally had two numbers). No.32 on the left was built somewhat later, in the early part of the 19th Century. These two buildings housed the warehouse and shop of Waddington's, and upstairs were music rooms (and presumably also offices).

This is a picture of the tiled staircase in No.32, leading up to the first floor - whether it was the same back when the building was a piano warehouse I don't know, but the tiles certainly look fairly old.

Here's a picture of the first-floor front room at No.34 - possibly this was once used for musical soirees?

This is a picture taken from the rear window of No.32, now Cath Kidston's. The building at the very top right of the photo is the rear extension to the Masonic Hall in Duncombe Place, built in the 1930s and which backs on to the Olde Starre Inne (therefore very likely the site of the original workshop used by Waddington's). There were more buildings over what is now the grassed area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so this area was very likely part of the factory at that time.

J. W. Knowles gives us some further information on the history of the firm. He says: "In 1920 the removal of the manufacturing part of the business was considered to be necessary, the premises in Stonegate being old and much cut up into small sections. Therefore a new and up to date factory was planned and commenced at Scarborough and in 1922 the whole of the Stonegate premises were cleared and the two warehouses fronting Stonegate converted into shops, which are to be made into show rooms for the sale of their pianos, and on August 17th two large and artistic posters were affixed to the plate glass windows which had been fixed the previous week."

Until recently, a 36-minute film from the Yorkshire film archive showing operations at the Waddington factory in Scarborough in 1928 was available online (you may still be able to access a copy by contacting them). This factory became part of, or at least was very near, the site of Plaxton's Coachworks in Seamer Road. Part of the building survived in the form of the Mere Social Club (originally the Waddington Works Club); however, this too was demolished in 2012. The Coachworks itself happily survives as a local business, though now it has moved to more modern premises just down the road in Seamer.

Unfortunately, if the directors of Waddington's back in 1920 had had a crystal ball, they might have thought twice about their investment in new manufacturing premises, because the firm succumbed to the onslaught of the wireless, the gramophone and the Great Depression as did most other British piano manufacturers in the early 1930s, and just like Pohlmann's, the subject of my last post. In fact, information on their time in Scarborough is relatively thin, perhaps because they were only based there for a little over 10 years.

The Herne Hill Piano

There is an interesting addendum to this story. Later on, the Waddington factory made pianos under the name "Bremar", and one of these later became something of a celebrity in its own right. Here's a film about it:

Judging by appearance, the piano probably dates from around the 1920s, so it could have been made in either York or Scarborough. Apparently the original Herne Hill piano was retired in late 2016 - however the crowdfunding project for a replacement was so successful that some money has also been raised to help pay for piano lessons for children whose parents can't afford piano lessons.

Yorkshire Piano Makers (1): Pohlmann and Son

I've recently tuned two customers' pianos made by the firm of Pohlmann & Son. Historically, the British piano-making industry was concentrated mainly in London, especially around the area of Camden Town. In his book "Pianos and their Makers" from 1910, Alfred Dolge lists just three piano makers outside London, all of them based in Halifax; one of these firms was Pohlmann's.

 

This is one of the Pohlmann pianos I tuned, dating from around 1905-1910 - pictures reproduced by kind permission of the customer

The origins of the firm seem to be swathed in a certain degree of folklore, because Johannes Pohlman was a noted early maker of square pianos in London between 1768 and 1790. He is often described as one of the "twelve apostles", a group of German and Dutch instrument makers who seem to have emigrated to England around the time of the Seven Years' War (1756 to 1763). Whether there were in fact twelve of them, and exactly who they were, is the subject of some degree of debate, but Johannes Pohlman's instruments are some of the earliest keyboard instruments produced in London and those that survive are of great historical interest.

The Yorkshire firm of Pohlmann's was founded in 1823 by Henry Pohlmann (though Dolge gives the date of establishment as 1832), who evidently grew up in the local area. Local researches suggest that his father was born in Marburg in Hesse, though it is not known why the family originally came to Halifax. Unfortunately information is so scant that it seems impossible to say with certainty that Henry Pohlmann was in any way related to his distinguished predecessor, though the firm seems to have later on claimed, or at least hinted, that this was the case. However, the history of Pohlmann and Sons itself is of great interest, as one of the first and most important firms to base itself outside London.

It does seem that the firm was exceptionally progressive in adopting new innovations. Some information can be discovered from a business directory "Dublin, Cork and South of Ireland", by Stratten and Stratten, 1892, on account of the company's showrooms at 40 Dawson Street, in the centre of Dublin. A picture of the showroom is included:

The Dublin building still stands and today houses the Café en Seine. Does the roof vaulting look at all familiar?

 

The firm's entry in the directory states that they were the first manufacturers in England, apart from Erard's of London, to use the 7¼ octave (88 note) keyboard that is standard on all modern instruments (a great many older pianos have a 7 octave or 85 note keyboard). Also,the firm adopted full cast-iron frames in 1870 and overstringing in 1871, and the article states they were the first English manufacturers to do so. Apparently at this time, the proprietor of the business was George H Pohlmann, and he personally inspected every piano made before it left the factory.

Another clue comes from the official catalogue of the Yorkshire Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures, held in Leeds in 1875. An advertisement for Pohlmann & Son appears and refers to "Prize Medal Upright and Oblique Grand Pianoforte Manufacturers." More significantly, it states that they were the "Only Manufacturers in England of the American Model Upright Iron Overstrung Grand Pianofortes." This perhaps requires a little explanation. Firstly, it may seem a little confusing that the terms "upright" and "grand" appear together, but "Upright Grand" was a term used, particularly in the nineteenth century, by manufacturers - it might be taken to mean a large upright, but essentially it means the same as an upright piano. More importantly, however, it refers to the "American model." This term refers to the system of an overstrung bass with a full cast-iron frame, because the first piano of this type was built by Steinway's of New York in the 1850s. Most German manufacturers were quick to embrace the new technology, but it took much longer to find favour with British piano-makers. Perhaps the German ancestry of Pohlmann's founders and their location outside London helped them resist the conservatism of the rest of the industry. Certainly, their adoption of these innovations by 1875 means that they were early enthusiasts for the new way of building pianos - the way, in fact, all modern pianos are built.

The article refers to the Company's showrooms in Princess Street, Halifax and their factory in Hall Street. The building on Princess Street is now a Turkish restaurant called the Olivetta (which incidentally seems to have some good reviews on Trip Advisor if you are minded to visit):

The location of the "steam factory", as it is described in 1875, took a little more tracking down. The original buildings on the west side of Hall Street were all demolished at some point to make way for a dual carriageway relief road, but some online maps of Halifax around 1890 showed a building in Hall Street marked "piano manufactory", and the building was on the east side of Hall Street, where some of the original structures remain. And indeed, the factory still stands - it is today known as "Rimani House" and is a suite of offices, with Calderdale Carers' Project amongst the tenants:

Back in 1890 there was an iron foundry immediately opposite on the now-demolished west side of the street, which perhaps might have been handy for the manufacture of those cast-iron frames. Nice to think, however, that a piece of piano history still survives in the form of this building.

The firm seems to have gone into decline some time after the First World War, a matter perhaps not helped by the death of Reginald Pohlmann, who served in the Royal Flying Corps along with his brother during the conflict. It seems Pohlmann's stopped making pianos under the onslaught of the gramophone and wireless, ceasing manufacture some time in the 1930s, although I cannot find any record of the exact date when the last piano emerged from the factory doors. Later on the company, like several others of its kind, switched to selling radios, records and eventually television sets until it was taken over by Rediffusion.

The two Pohlmann pianos I have come across recently are robust, well-built instruments which have an extremely pleasant tone for their age (they are both around 100 years old). Although one sometimes has to be careful about manufacturers' claims, at the very least they seem to have been a firm committed to building high-quality pianos, and exceptionally forward-thinking in adopting new methods and technologies.

Although not listed in Dolge's book, there were several other piano manufacturers in Yorkshire around this time - a subject I shall return to in a later post.

Addendum: In a conversation with Dr Alastair Laurence of Broadwood's, he mentioned that he had (at a later date) met two of the brothers who were running the Pohlmann firm when it ceased making pianos.

By the 1930s, the business was being run by three of the Pohlmann brothers and their sister - Henry and Frederick were managing the piano manufacturing side, whilst Arnold and Cissy were looking after the showrooms in Princess Street. Henry Pohlmann was a piano designer who had studied with the famous German firm of Grotrian-Stenweg.

Due to the economic depression and the advance of radios, gramophones and other forms of entertainment, the 1930s were a dreadful period for the British piano industry, and the great majority of established manufacturers ceased trading. The last pianos were made by Pohlmann's in 1933 and the factory was then closed, but all the patents and designs of the firm and the right to use the Pohlmann name were sold to the well-known London company of Danemann's. The designs did not gather dust in a cupboard, because several Danemann models subsequently included string patterns or design features earlier used by Pohlmann's.

Merry Christmas

Just a note to wish customers, colleagues, friends and family all the best for Christmas and the New Year.

As some of you may already know from previous posts, I'm very fond of the humour of the famous pianist Victor Borge, but I couldn't find any specifically Christmas-related sketches by him. However, he is famous for this quote:

"Santa Claus has the right idea - visit people once a year."

Now despite his pianistic talent Mr Borge was not, as far as I know, ever a piano tuner. If he had been, he might have disagreed with this statement - in fact it's a good idea to have your piano tuned at least once a year to keep the tuning in good order, but I have customers who prefer more regular tunings to keep their piano in top condition all the time. So I am always very delighted to visit whenever you need me!

In any case, I thought it might be fun to have a look at Victor Borge's attempt here to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra back in 1986 - and I hope you all have an enjoyable festive season.

Feeling the tension (2): Calculating the tension on a piano string

In the last post, I promised that I would explain how to calculate the tension on a piano string, so I'm going to do that now. To do this, we will need to know three things:

• The speaking length of the piano string - that is the length between the capo bar and the upper bridge pin;
• The diameter of the wire - this should ideally be measured with a micrometer to get an accurate reading, since a small error may make a significant difference to the calculation; and,
• The exact pitch of the note (in Hertz or cycles per second).

With the pitch of the note, there are two ways to approach the matter - if you are so minded, you could use a chromatic tuner to ascertain the precise pitch of the note, or you could simply work on the assumption that the piano is at standard pitch (A above Middle C = 440Hz) which very often will be the case (though it is not uncommon for older pianos to be at a lower pitch).

A table of theoretically correct frequencies for each note on a piano can be found here. It should be noted that, on any well-tuned piano, the actual frequencies of notes outside the middle octaves may deviate somewhat from this, because of octave "stretching" - which makes the piano sound much better. Notes in the bass may be slightly flat of the "theoretically correct" frequency, those in the treble slightly sharp.

The Mersenne Equation 

At this point, enter the hero of our story - Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), who was a French monk, theologian, scientist, mathematician and "Renaissance Man", particularly noted for his contribution to acoustic theory.

One of Mersenne's most famous mathematical concepts was the "Mersenne Prime", namely prime numbers with the form:

Where n is a whole number. In fact, the six largest known prime numbers (at the time of writing) are all Mersenne Primes - this is due to the fact that they are easier to test mathematically than other prime numbers.

But on with the acoustic theory - the equation that concerns us is this one:

The Mersenne Equation:

Where F is the fundamental frequency of the note, L is the length of the string, T is the amount of tension on the string, and µ is the mass of the string per unit length. Put another way, this explains what are called Mersenne's Laws, viz., that the frequency is inversely proportional to the length, proportional to the square root of the tension and inversely proportional to the square root of the mass per unit length. This result is called Mersenne's equation (sometimes known as the Mersenne-Taylor equation or the Ideal String equation). The reason for the second alternative name is that the formula assumes that the string is perfectly flexible (zero stiffness) which is not the case in reality, and for that reason it is not quite perfect, but it will still provide an extremely good estimate for piano strings. (As a point of interest, one Galileo Galilei, who was a frequent correspondent of Mersenne's, also worked out the same thing, but Mersenne gets the credit because he demonstrated it experimentally).

We then need a set of units of measurement that will work. I won't go into the reasons for this, but if the following units are used, then the calculation will be correct:

• F (frequency) in Hertz (Hz)
• L (length) in metres (m)
• T (tension) in Newtons (N)
• µ (mass per unit length) in kilogrammes per metre (kg/m)

(There are other combinations of units that will work).

We then need to rearrange the equation above, because we are trying to calculate T, the tension. This gives the following result:

Before we can proceed any further, we also need a formula for µ, the mass per unit length of the string, which is as follows:

Where:

• π is the mathamatical constant pi
• d is the diameter of the wire (in metres)
• ρ is the density of the material from which the wire is made (in kg/m³) 

A sensible value for the density of high-grade steel used in piano wire is 7.85 g/cm³, which is 7,850 kg/m³ in the units we need to use. For the highest bass strings, according to this website, a value of 7.4 g/cm³ (7,400 kg/m³) is appropriate, ranging gradually down to 6.9 g/cm³ (6,900 kg/m³) for the thicker double-wound strings at the very bottom; this is because, although copper (used in the windings) is more dense than steel, the wound strings include a significant amount of air in the column.

Using the calculation in practice

This process can be demonstrated in practice using the middle C string of a Yamaha U1 upright piano, as follows:

I have removed the action of the piano to allow the string to be measured with a rule. In this case I haven't taken out the celeste rail (the piece of felt at the top) - this needs to come out for tuning to allow access to the pins. The top of the speaking length is the capo bar which is a ridge just underneath the pressure bar (the silver-coloured bar with the screws in it). I measured the length of the piano string with a rule and its diameter with a micrometer (seen in photo). Different strings on the same note will always have the same speaking length.

So you can see a little more clearly, here's a picture showing the pins, the pressure bar and the capo bar just below it without my arm in the way. On grand pianos, the end of the speaking length may be on the underside of the frame for some of the strings.

This shows part of the frame below the level of the keyboard. Each string passes across the bridge (the piece of wood sticking up in the middle of the photo), which transfers the vibration of the strings to the soundboard behind it. There are two pins attaching each string to the bridge - the upper one is the bottom end of the speaking length (in most cases there are three strings per note). In this case, the  middle C strings pass over the bridge towards the top right of the photo, behind the bass strings.

The speaking length of the middle C string is 0.665m and the diameter is exactly 1mm (0.001m).

Using the formula:

d² = 0.001² = 0.00001 m²
ρ = 7,850 kg/m³ (remembering, ρ = 7,850 kg/m³ for the steel strings or between 7,400 kg/m (upper bass copper-wound strings) and 6,900 kg/m³ (lower bass strings).

Multiplying up, we get µ = 0.006165 kg/m (i.e. one metre of the string weighs 6.2 grammes).

Then with the formula:

We get:

µ = 0.006165 kg/m
F = 261.626 Hz (the pitch of Middle C in equal temperament when the piano is at standard pitch of A = 440 Hz).
So F² = 68448.2
L = 0.665m
So L² = 0.442225

And the overall equation has the result T = 746 N. The result we get is measured in Newtons, which is a scientific unit of force - as any physicist will tell you, a kilogramme (or a pound) is a unit of mass, not force. However, a kilogramme force can be defined as the downward force exerted by a mass of one kilogramme in the gravitational field at the earth's surface. We can get this figure by dividing our result (746 N) by the physical constant g = 9.81m/s² which is the rate of acceleration of an object in freefall towards the earth.

This gives us our final result of 76.0 kilogrammes force. Assuming the tension on all 218 strings of the piano is roughly the same (as it almost certainly will be on a modern instrument), we can calculate that there will be approximately 16.6 tonnes of total pressure on the cast-iron frame.

One interesting point here is that Samuel Wolfenden, in his "Treatise on the Art of Pianoforte Construction" written in 1916, gives a set of model dimensions for a piano scale, in which the diameter of wire used on the middle C string is 1mm and the length is 0.688m. If this piano were tuned to A = 440 Hz, it would require a higher string tension of 81.4 kilogrammes force, but bearing in mind that Wolfenden was actually aiming for an older pitch standard then in use of A = 435 Hz, it can be seen that the modern U1 uses remarkably similar string dimensions and tensions to those that would have been employed on a high-quality piano from 100 years ago.

There is actually a great deal more that can be said about piano scale design, but as this post has already got fairly long and technical, I'll save that for another occasion.