The value of $50

One of the most widely known details about the history of the autoharp is that its name first appeared in an application for a US patent filed by Charles Zimmerman on 10 December 1881, and issued on 9 May 1882. Seeing an autoharp mentioned in an advertisement in the 21 September 1884 issue of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat is therefore unsurprising.

E. W. Muller instructs on piano, guitar, mendiline, zither, auto-harp, singing, etc.: a lodging-room in exchange for instructions.

This also provides a concrete date by which the autoharp had come into circulation, pushing the generally accepted estimate back from 1885. There is a useful clue about the model that Muller owned in the section headed “Criminal Notes” in the 16 February 1885 edition of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. This also corroborates the prior familiarity of the instrument’s name.

Frank Muller was jailed to-day on a charge of stealing an autoharp valued at $50, from Ernest W. Muller.

Assuming that it was made by Zimmermann, $50 is roughly what one might expect him to have charged for a handmade instrument of the design illustrated in his patent. It is rotated 180° here for comparison with the following images.

We know that such things existed through an undated photograph of Zimmermann playing one, reproduced by Ivan Stiles in an article published in 1991. The bars don’t quite match the ones in the patent drawing and this may be intermediate to a design discussed below.

Zimmermann retained this profile in a model with an elaborate bar mechanism that was intended for exhibition. A widely syndicated newspaper article about its development was datelined “Philadelphia, Feb. 28 [1885]” and published under varying titles. These included “A Search for Harmony: the Strange Career of Carl Zimmerman, the Inventor of the Autoharp,” in the 1 March issue of the St. Louis Globe Dispatch. The following two snippets are taken from the 7 March 1885 issue of the New York Sun.

CARL ZIMMERMANN’S LIFE DREAM.

An Ingenious Musical Instrument Which he has Completed
at 70 Years of Age.

PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 28. — Even if Carl Zimmermann had not invented a new system of musical notation, a private view of his autoharp would have been of special interest from the fact that it represents the result of a life labor of seventy years and the embodiment of a dream. Since he was born at Morgonroth in Saxony, in 1816, it has been the aim of Zimmermann’s life to produce a single instrument combining the range and volume of the piano with the sweetness of the harp. In the autoharp, which is not for sale and of which there are only two in existence, he professes to have accomplished this design, and more. … A private view of the autoharp was had at the depot of John Albert, on Ninth Street, near Samsom, in this city. Albert has long been a friend of Zimmermann. The only autoharp in existence besides that seen here has been shipped to the World’s Fair at New Orleans. It is a chromatic stringed instrument, in general appearance more like the zither than any other. The models made are about twenty inches long by eighteen wide. The autoharp has the same system of stringing as the harp. It is played, however, by pressing on a series of knobs which produce a series of chords in every key.

It is not clear how literally this can be read. There are a few puzzling details of no particular consequence, such as an innocuous error in the indication of Zimmermann’s birth year as 1816. (The record of his baptism states: “Carl Friedrich August Zimmermann … born the 14th Febr 1817 and baptized the 23rd Febr.”) The article goes on to claim with overt hyperbole that he began mulling over the autoharp shortly after seeing the light of day, made its “first designs” at the age of eleven, finally to “abandon them in despair” in his mid-teens.

The information about the availability of the autoharp in the cited segment of the article appears to have been provided by Albert, rather than Zimmermann. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that either would have been unaware of autoharps having been in circulation before the journalist’s visit. In order for the statement about there being only two in existence to be correct, it would have to apply specifically to the exhibition model. An alternative supposition would be that Zimmermann was not the maker of Ernest Muller’s autoharp.

The shipment of one of the exhibition instruments to the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair meshes with information provided by Becky Blackley in The Autoharp Book, published in 1983. The full name of the event was “The World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition” and took place from 16 December 1884 to 31 May 1885. Blackley shows the “Certificate of First Degree of Merit” issued to Zimmermann on its penultimate day, for the autoharp he displayed there.

The entry in the Official Catalog of the exhibition is otherwise as terse and erroneously unhelpful as could possibly be: “Zimmermann, C. F., Philadelphia, Pa. Alkor Harp.” Blackley notes that Zimmermann then exhibited his autoharp at the “Novelties Exhibition” held in Philadelphia from 15 September to 15 October 1885 (for “recent discoveries and inventions in the Sciences, Arts, and Manufactures”). He placed an advertisement in its Official Catalog, presenting the displayed instrument in both German and English. This includes a detailed description, cited in only small part here.

The Autoharp is an instrument constructed similar to a zither… There are 12 mechanical keys…by the use of which 132 different harmonious chords can be formed by striking the strings.

Zimmermann’s initial patent presents two types of bars. One damps strings to enable the production of chords, of which there is no set number. The other raises the pitch of all strings an octave by touching their midpoints. There can only be one such full-length bar and the patent differentiates it from the others with the prefix “flageolet.”

This makes it likely that an undated Zimmermann instrument Blackley illustrates is the exhibition model. An instrument of the same design appears in another photo in her book, taken of a corporate display case at a trade exhibition in 1895. She describes the separate instrument as having one flageolet bar, 12 chord bars, and 27 shifters that permit “all major, minor, dominant seventh, minor seventh, and diminished seventh chords.” Zimmermann’s own description doesn’t mention the flageolet bar but the 12 chord bars can produce all those in the list just cited (which Blackley can have quoted verbatim; “shifters” change the positions of damping pads on a given bar).

There is an identical instrument in the collection of Rick Meyers, shown here with his kind permission. The stylized “1881” above the button slots in the decorated guard plate is the year Zimmermann filed his patent application. The action of the damper bars perpendicular to the strings also differs from the one in the patent drawing, where that motion is parallel to the strings. It is unclear which action is shown in the preceding photo but perceptible detail of the dampers on the treble bars suggests the perpendicular one.

Zimmermann placed an advertisement in the Bulletin of the Novelties Exhibition, which first appeared on 15 May 1885 and then biweekly for the duration of the event. It illustrated an autoharp of the same basic profile as the one advertised in the exhibition catalog but had a simplified bar mechanism. It therefore seems that both were on hand.

Based on the cover of an undated booklet that reflects Zimmermann’s participation in the first of these events but not the second, Blackley concludes that he shifted focus from exhibition to production during the intervening interval. If so, the design with the simplified bars may have been in preparation for larger-scale manufacture. It would then be reasonable to see it together with the one in the photo of Zimmermann as an individually made, or small-series prototype.

However, the central illustration on the cover of the cited booklet is a five-bar autoharp with an entirely different “miniature” profile. Lucille Reilly inserted a reproduction of the cover in a comment following this post, which I have lifted into the main text.

The edition of Zimmermann’s Simplified Harmony Teacher she also refers to in the comment includes a drawing of the exhibition model, nearly identical to the photo above. The drawing is on the first page, framed by text that indicates its availability for purchase. The production styles appear later in the book. The one in the preceding image is Style #2¾ in a series that begins with the Style #1 seen here.

It has the simplified bar action of the nine-bar trapezoidal model that I’m supposing may have been the type in Muller’s hands. Otherwise, the price of a Style #1 miniature autoharp was $3.50. Shifters that enable a single bar to produce more than one chord are found on Styles Nos. 3‍–6. It is uncertain that the top-of-the-line Style #6 was available at the outset but the first price listed for it was just over half of what Muller paid. When a Concert Grand was added to the line-up a decade later as a flagship successor to the exhibition model, it cost three times his investment.

The $50 may have been an exaggerated figure and Muller can have owned an imported instrument. In any case, it is unlikely that his students would all have been able to afford that much for an autoharp, especially if they were beginners uncertain of how persistent their interest would become. (There is more about all this in the comments following this post.)

If the production styles were available at the time of Muller’s ad for autoharp lessons, his prospective students would have been able to select those commensurate with their personal economies. Taking $50 as a baseline figure for an individually made autoharp in the mid-1880s, it is worth noting that the present-day equivalent in terms of purchasing power is just under $1,500. This is about where luthier-built autoharps now start.

This post’s featured image shows the pavilion in New Orleans where the autoharp was exhibited.

Zimmermann’s 1882 patent is available here. The 1885 syndicated article about him is here.

Becky Blackley’s book is out of print but its text can be searched online. Rick Meyers has his own website and Lucille Reilly has hers. Ivan Stiles’s article is available here.

The short newspaper notices are behind a paywall. The other cited documents that are available in digital form can be accessed via the following links:

• New Orleans Exhibition Catalog entry.
• Philadelphia Exhibition Catalog entry.
• Philadelphia Exhibition Catalog advertisement.
• Philadelphia Exhibition Bulletin advertisement.