Aluminum piano plate
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Winter and Company, piano manufacturers, and Alcoa, a manufacturer of aluminum and aluminum products created a piano with an aluminum piano plate in the late 1940s.
Winter and Company, established in 1899, manufactured pianos in New York City. They introduced the first modern 44-inch console piano in 1935 and and the 39-inch spinet the following year, marketed as Lowboys or Musette pianos. Winter & Co. purchased the Aeolian-American Company in 1959 and changed names to Aeolian Inc. Winter and Company was also the first company to introduce the Alumatone plate, a piano frame made of aluminum. The metal frame of a piano, often called the plate or harp anchors both ends of the strings and resists upwards of 20 tons tension. The first complete metal frames were patented in the mid 1820s, and are now generally cast in iron.
The similar strength of aluminum and cast iron permitted the weight of the cast metal frame to be reduced more than 60 percent, to as little as 45 pounds for a spinet. In 1945, Alcoa signed an agreement with Winter and Company to manufacture aluminum piano plates and began to market their new creation. Many of Alcoa’s ads can be seen in Etude, a magazine for the musician and pianist, in 1949 and 1950. The typical ad campaign boasted the slogan “stop…lift…listen,” which was asking consumers to stop, feel the light weight of the new piano, and listen to the quality of sound. A brochure, circulated by Alcoa, claimed that some 50,000 pianos had been created containing this aluminum plate by 1949. After 1950, however, the aluminum piano plate was no longer used in pianos by piano manufacturers.
[edit] Other aluminum instruments
As soon as aluminum was available in the late nineteenth century, people began experimenting with making new or improved musical instruments, but it was not until the 1930s that companies began to consider mass producing these aluminum instruments. In the 1930s, Joseph Maddy requested that Alcoa experiment with manufacturing an aluminum violin and string bass. Maddy, founder of the Interlochen School of Music, (now the Interlochen Center for the Arts) was a band director from Michigan looking for durability in musical instruments. He wanted an instrument that could handle the abuse it received from his students as well as from atmospheric changes since many of his rehearsals were conducted outside. Maddy’s business venture, however, did not last long due to lack of demand. Other products using aluminum were manufactured in the 1930s including Laurens Hammond’s electric organ created in 1935. Some instruments were more successful than others, such as the vibraphone or vibraharp. The vibraphone was created in 1921 by the Leedy Manufacturing Company. A vibraphone is a percussion instrument that has a series of bars, with tubes below to help resonate the sound. The vibraphone gets its name because below the bars are vibrating fans that can be turned on an off electronically and help to give the instrument a vibrato effect. The Vibraharp, created in 1928 by J. C. Deagan, is the same instrument, but created out of aluminum instead of the previous options of wood or steel. Due to its success, Leedy began manufacturing their vibraphones in aluminum in 1929. The vibraphone is still made of aluminum today.
[edit] References
- The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Library and Archives, Alcoa Collection, Pittsburg, PA.
- Etude: The Music Magazine, 1945-1950
- Carr, C. C. (1952). Alcoa: An American Enterprise. New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc.
- Pierce, B. (1965). Pierce Piano Atlas: The Original Michel’s (6th ed.). Long Beach, CA: Bob Pierce.
- Wade-Mathews, M. (2002). Music: An Illustrated History. New York: Hermes House.
