This post revisits documents that have been discussed previously in several venues. It adds lesser known material in a summarized chronology of the innovative activity of the instrument makers named below. The intention is to clarify residual uncertainty about the priority of their respective contributions to the development of mechanized chord zithers.
Carl Friedrich Zimmermann was born in 1817 in Morgonröthe, Germany, a village in the district of Vogtland. It is 20 km on a straight line from Markneukirchen — an epicenter of the German musical instrument industry, also in Vogtland — where the five years younger Karl August Gütter lived and worked. Zimmermann was a renowned accordion and concertina maker who emigrated to the USA in 1864, where he continued his involvement with that craft.
Zimmermann came to see replacing staff notation with a numerical system as his life’s mission. It was rooted in a concertina tutor published in 1851. One of the pivotal statements of the system’s further development is in US Patent no. 110719, issued to him on 3 January 1871 for an “Improvement in Musical Notation for Accordions” (discussed further in separate posts).
Gütter was indirectly involved in music pedagogy but may have had no particular personal interest in it. On 19 October 1877, he facilitated the acquisition of provisional British Patent no. 1877:3883 for a keyboard-based “Apparatus for Teaching Music” on behalf of Hermann August Gütter, who it is safe to assume was a relative. It is mentioned here because it indicates Karl August’s familiarity with the British patent process.
Zimmermann cited his own 1871 patent in a separate patent application for a “Harp” that he submitted on 10 December 1881, and was issued as US Patent no. 257808 on 9 May 1882. This is where the term “autoharp” was coined and its definitive damping bars first described. On 20 May 1884, Gütter (together with Hermann Lindemann) applied for a German patent for a functionally equivalent but mechanically different, and differently shaped “Device for damping individual strings on stringed instruments,” issued on 5 January 1885 as German patent no. 29930.
Zimmermann used both the English name autoharp and the equivalent German Autoharfe in a bilingual description of an autoharp with a redesigned bar mechanism that he displayed at the New Orleans World’s Fair from 16 December 1884 to 31 May 1885. He put it back on view at the Novelties Exhibition (for “recent discoveries and inventions in the Sciences, Arts, and Manufactures”) in Philadelphia from 15 September to 15 October 1885. The bilingual narrative appeared in the Official Catalogue of that exhibition.
A few of Zimmermann’s exhibition autoharps still exist, as do illustrations of them. Becky Blackley included a photograph of one in her seminal The Autoharp Book, from 1983. The image below accompanied another of Zimmermann’s bilingual texts, published a few years after the catalog. It is followed by a photo of an instrument in the Rick Meyers Collection of Fretless Zithers, Portland, Oregon.
The exhibition description states that this model has 12 chord bars. The 13th one in both images (and Blackley’s) is a “flageolet bar” that touches all strings at their midpoints to produce octave harmonics. The extensive numerical labeling belongs to Zimmermann’s system of music notation.
Four months before the opening of the Novelties Exhibition, its arrangers began publishing a biweekly Bulletin. Zimmermann placed the following advertisement in all issues between 15 May and 15 October 1885.
This illustrates an autoharp with the same basic profile as the one described in the Catalogue but with a simpler bar mechanism, a smaller number of strings, and tuned diatonically with only a few accidentals. It therefore seems that both variants were on hand at the event. Zimmermann moved to 240 N. Second Street in 1884, from his music store next door at 238 (illustrated in another post).
He began manufacturing autoharps at the new location. Mike Fenton located an autoharp nearly identical to one shown immediately above, on a study visit to the Musical Instrument Museum in Markneukirchen, Germany. He described it and included a photograph in the final installment of a three-part report about his experience there, in the issue of the Autoharp Quarterly from Fall 1996.
Recent photos of that instrument (inv. no. 4491) appear below, kindly provided by Mario Weller at the museum. The accession record is dated 1 December 1981 (the centenary month of Zimmermann’s patent application!) and notes that it had “long been at the museum but not previously inventoried.”
This instrument is unsigned but Zimmermann is indicated as its maker by the labeling of the buttons with his system of numerical music notation. The bars are also fitted with pad shifters as he devised them. The decorative grille where he would have placed his name and patent number is missing, but the instrument has what can effectively be seen as his signature flageolet bar, again with an unmarked top. (The museum also holds a Style 2¾ autoharp instrument with the Zimmermann Dolgeville label, inv. no. 1011, corroborating that its collections include such instruments made in the US.)
Here are the bars from the Markneukirchen instrument. The flageolet is uppermost and the “shifters” on four of the chord bars are clearly seen. This provides technical facility between that of the 13-bar exhibition model and the one in the advertisement. It seems safe to posit that the drawing shows the least elaborate production form of what Zimmermann termed his “large autoharps.”
He made several of the 13-bar exhibition models, whether for sale or not, and continued to display them at trade events. The extent to which he marketed the nine-bar and ten-bar models is similarly uncertain. A large flagship instrument remained in his catalog but mainstream production focused on a range of “miniature autoharps” with the now familiar wing shape.
On 26 June 1884, Gütter submitted application no. LI G 2703 for a German patent with the same heading as the one dated a month earlier, but it was either withdrawn or rejected, and its specification was not archived. In apparent coordination, on 12 June 1884 he filed an application for what would become British Patent no. 1884:8888. It was for “Improvements to Stringed Musical Instruments” with a “provisional specification” dated 4 September 1884. This claimed an adaptation of the bar mechanism described in the 1884 German patent application, to the piano.
The invention is applicable to zithers, pianos and similar stringed instruments. In the case of pianos, the rail, provided on its underside with dampers, may be suspended from a double-armed lever, the opposite end of which is hinged to another double-armed lever extending to the outside of the frame of the piano, so that the extremity of said lever is situated a short distance above the key board.
September 1884 was also the month when the first colloquial reference to the autoharp appeared in the US daily press, detailed here and discussed further below. It can plausibly have been Zimmermann’s large 9-bar model. However, it may also indicate that he had begun distributing miniature autoharps by that date.
Gütter replaced the preliminary specification of his 1884 British patent wholesale with a fundamentally different “complete specification” filed on 11 March 1885. This was two months after the approval of the German patent. In the meanwhile, Lindemann had bought out Gütter’s share in it, presumably also derailing the latter’s plans for patenting it abroad.
Significant confusion has resulted from the conflation of Gütter’s two British specifications, exacerbated by the date of a patent being set to that of the initial application even if its processing extended beyond the year of its submission. As described above, by the date of the complete British specification, Zimmermann had modified the action of his damping bars from moving parallel to the strings to ones moving perpendicularly toward them.
Gütter’s complete specification claimed both types, providing alternate means “to enable the player to produce harmonious chords whilst touching the whole of the strings simultaneously.” One had the same action as the bars without shifters in Zimmermann’s exhibition models. The other combined Zimmermann’s initial bar design with a “plucking device” described in German Patent no. 33193, registered to Theodor Meinhold (also working in Vogtland) on 12 October 1884.
The next images show Gütter’s damping-bar variant, followed by Zimmermann’s Style #1 miniature autoharp. There is no conceivable possibility of their resemblance being coincidental.
Zimmermann’s numbered production styles lacked the flageolet bar which, as stated in his initial patent, “rendered it necessary to change the shape of the common zither.” He reverted to that form when he started to produce miniature autoharps, which is widely believed to have been in 1885. If so, the references in the daily press beginning in September 1884 would have been to a large instrument. Had Gütter been aware of that design, he may have melded its bar action with the zither-like instrument in his German patent, revising its contour at the same time.
The 1884 references may instead have been to a miniature autoharp – perhaps in limited pre-release circulation. In that case, it becomes likely that Gütter co-opted its profile into his 1885 design, just as he did with Zimmermann’s damping bars. Extending this speculative scenario a bit further, if Zimmermann took notice of Gütter’s 1885 specification before settling on the profile of his miniature autoharps, he may have decided to preempt the exploitation of his innovations by using the external shape seen in that specification, rather than whatever he otherwise might have had in mind.
Beyond reference to “a harp of the form substantially as shown and described” in Zimmermann’s initial patent, none of the early patents specified a soundbox contour. The claimed innovations all related to the bars. Every mechanical detail these documents treat as a definitive attribute of the autoharp can be attested in multiple sources as having originated with Zimmermann.
The shape seen in the preceding two images appeared time and again in patents from the late-19th and early-20th centuries, claiming innovative chord-producing devices in attempts to ride on the popularity that the autoharp rapidly began to acquire, with no indication of that shape having been regarded as other than obvious. The retrospective argument that the external profile is indeed essential in determining what counts as an autoharp excludes all of the large instruments discussed above, as well as the form in Gütter’s German patent.
The only part of the dated evidence that broaches interpretation is the origin of that contour. No matter how its significance is assessed, it emerged on the drawing board of an instrument maker either in Vogtland or from Vogtland, and made its way from the one to the other within a matter of months.