The United States Patent Office published a Classification of Subjects of Invention on 1 July 1861. Musical instruments were placed in Class H, which had the broad heading “Fine Arts and Games.” Nine specific types of instrument were listed, of which “harps” were the only one anywhere near the substance of the following discussion.
A restructured Classified Index of Subjects of Invention with 145 numbered classes was published on 1 March 1872. Class 84 was “Music” with 66 subclasses that included the general category “stringed instruments.” “Banjos” and “dulcimers” joined harps in the list of specific instrument types.
The Revised Classification of Subjects of Invention, published on 4 January 1881, still had 145 classes. “Music” remained Class 84 but the number of its subclasses was reduced to 44. This was done by eliminating general headings and culling the named instruments. “Stringed instruments” were removed, as were “dulcimers,” leaving “harps” again the nearest classification for anything at all like a zither.
Skipping over two decades during which a lot of innovation took place on the zither front, in the revision of the Classification of Subjects of Invention published on 1 July 1906, the number of classes increased to 237, with “Music” still Class 84. It had 249 subclasses, many with subdivisions. “Harps” remained an undivided subclass, joined by “autoharps” and “zithers” in undivided subclasses of their own.
The application for US Patent no. 541,352 was titled “Autoharp” and dated 4 December 1894. It was for “improvements in and relating to musical instruments of the class known as auto-harps.” This indicates that a so-named subclass was introduced in a revision prior to the one from 1906. (There are bibliographic records of such editions but I’m only working with those for which I’ve thus far located digitized facsimiles.)
This generic use of the term autoharp marked a significant departure from the tightly focused context in which it was coined. Its first attested usage was in a patent application filed by Charles Zimmermann on 10 December 1881, and issued as US Patent no. 257,808 on 9 May 1882. (He used the German “Autoharfe” in a presumably earlier but undated autobiography.) As seen in the preceding paragraph, the targeted subclass was commonly indicated by the wording of the introductory sentence. The closest available alternative in this case also provided the title of the application — “Harp.”
Be it known that I, Charles F. Zimmermann…have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Harps, of which the following is a specification…
That specification relies on comparison with the (concert) zither.
…“trigger bars”…are arranged transversely with the strings of the harp. A harp so provided has the size of a zither, and which I term an “autoharp”…
“Trigger bars” was his designation for damping bars and the claimed innovations all pertained to them. They were named for the part of the bar engaged by the player’s finger. Each trigger bar muted the strings not belonging to a designated chord. The sole exception was one that touched all strings at their midpoints.
This requirement rendered it necessary to change the shape of the common zither to that shown in the drawings.
In this light, the coined label autoharp was quite apt, but the patent conferred no protection on the term itself. Zimmermann subsequently registered US Trademark no 22,339 for the word “autoharp” but did not apply for it until 23 December 1892. The Library of Congress holds an annotated copy of the certificate with an affixed cut-out of its announcement in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office.
This was two months after the retroactively protected word had been used in the application for US Patent no. 480,816, submitted on 17 November 1891 with the title “Musical Instrument.” It is possible that this prompted Zimmermann’s action. However, it was too late to stem the acceptance of autoharp as a generic name for a type of musical instrument in patents, as it had long since become in colloquial contexts.
This invention relates to improvements to stringed musical instruments…on banjo pattern…to so construct the instrument as to adapt it to be converted to an auto-harp.
This post’s banner image shows the converted form in one of the patent drawings. However crackpot the notion, or impracticable this design may be, there is no doubt about what the term autoharp designated.
This generic usage expanded further in US Patent no. 511,970, titled “Autoharp,” applied for on 12 May 1893 — four months after Zimmermann’s trademark.
This invention relates to the class of harps commonly known as “autoharps,” and which are provided with a series of muffler-bars crossing the strings…and…depressed act upon and damp certain of the strings…
The first patent cited above explicitly invoked the subgroup “autoharps.” In the corresponding scheme for trademarks, the stacked classifications “Musical Instruments” and “String instruments” on Zimmermann’s trademark, were extended with “Autoharps, citherns, and guitars” in US Trademark no. 31,739, registered three years later.
Here again the marginalia are informative. The classification hierarchy initially intended by the examiner may have been “Musical Instruments”; “Stringed Musical Instruments”; “Autoharps, zithers, and guitars.” “Cithern” replaced “zither” in the subgroup indicated on the printed document, leaving “zither” to appear in the graphic device. The Library of Congress records this as is it would be read: “Queen Zither brand Autoharps, Citherns, and Guitars.”
Zimmermann’s trademark reads “Autoharp brand String Instruments.” His laxity in protecting the name of the initial invention was echoed by his neglecting to patent significant changes that he soon made to the functionality of the bars in the 1881 design. The notification of the patent for it in the Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office was illustrated with a side view of a trigger bar, which the examiner presumably selected as the most representative patent drawing.
As already noted, the patent claims all related to the bar mechanism. It was intended to be used in “combination with a harp of the form substantially as shown and described.” Zimmermann retained that form in an elaborate model he displayed at the World’s Fair in New Orleans between 16 December 1884 and 31 May 1885, and at subsequent trade fairs and exhibitions.
The initial trigger bars moved parallel to the stringbed to bring dampers into contact with the strings. The 1884 modification changed that action to bars moving perpendicularly toward the stringbed, each with a button near its midpoint. The lateral action was repurposed to shift the alignment of the pads with the strings.
Zimmermann seems to have believed (and may have been advised) that his patent coverage went beyond the claimed trigger bars to damping bars more generally. He offered instruments of the exhibition type for sale but further revised the design of the ones he took into larger-scale production. The central bar that “rendered it necessary to change the shape of the common zither to that shown in the drawings” was removed, and the contour of the instrument reverted to one closer to a zither. This was in a second apparent belief that it remained “substantially as shown and described” in his patent.
Zimmermann began publicizing “miniatur[e] autoharps” in 1885 but the US daily press attested the availability of autoharps in 1884 (of uncertain design; discussed in detail in a previous post). His Style #1 is seen in the next illustration, fitted with single-action button bars. Higher-numbered styles have more bars, some with laterally acting “shifters” that reposition selected pads to change the produced chord.
The precarity of Zimmermann’s assumptions about the scope of the 1882 patent coverage, as well as rights to the term “autoharp,” became apparent with US Patent no. 511970 shown above. The “Autoharp” for which it was granted differed from his production style instruments in no regard other than the “swinging” action of its button bars.
He ultimately sought patent protection for his own modified bar designs but, as with his trademark, did so too late for it to make a difference. On 15 September 1895, he submitted an application for what would be issued as US Patent no. 583162 on 25 May 1897. It was headed “Autoharp” and used the word in a generic sense without mentioning his trademark.
Be it known I, Charles F. Zimmermann…have invented new and useful Improvements in Autoharps, of which the following is a specification. This invention relates to an improvement in harps or citherns…
The patent made 12 claims all related to the bar mechanism. The instrument illustrating this closely resembled the exhibition model shown above. The patented bar design included devices that both terminated and initiated the vibration of strings.
Laterally acting bars fitted with plectrums first appeared in the “complete specification” for a British patent application submitted on behalf of the German citizen Karl August Gütter on 11 March 1885. This fundamentally changed the “provisional specification” initially filed on 4 September 1884. The plucking bars were one of two devices unmentioned in 1884 but claimed in the 1885 specification. The other was an array of damping bars identical to Zimmermann’s button bars.
The British patent drawings showed both devices affixed to a “kind of zither” with a contour that was congruent with Zimmermann’s production style autoharps. The nearly identical appearance of the two button bar instruments cannot possibly have been coincidental, and the circumstances of their resemblance are of obvious historical significance. I’ll delve into this in the next post, with details about relevant British and German patents, and other bits of historical evidence that have largely been overlooked.
