An earlier post discussed an undated autobiography that Carl Friedrich (Charles Frederick) Zimmermann wrote after his emigration from Germany to the USA. Details indicate that he authored it during the 1870s and pinpoint his relocation to 1864. This date is corroborated by official documents, with 238 North Second Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as his initial base of operations. Contemporary descriptions of his activity there shed further light on the shift of his focus from accordions and concertinas to the autoharp. The autobiography says the following about that location.
I now heeded my brother’s call to America with my wife and six children, leaving two behind with my parents-in-law. A service maid in my 48th year, I took over my brother’s music store — in a sorry state at the time — while he left me four months after my arrival and traveled to Germany.
That music store can be traced back to the 1851 edition of McElroy’s Philadelphia City Directory, where it is listed as the firm of “SCHMIDT & ZIMMERMAN, impor[ters of] musical inst[ruments]” located at 408 North Second Street. The partners were Richard T. Schmidt and Charles Moritz Zimmermann, later to become known as piano and drum manufacturers respectively. Their alliance was apparently short lived, with each appearing at a different location in the following year’s edition of the same directory; Schmidt as a music teacher and Zimmermann operating a music store.
Subsequent editions list his store at different addresses on North Second Street, arriving at #238 in 1858, where it remained into the 1880s. In the year it settled at that location, Edwin T. Freedley published an extensive narrative titled Philadelphia and Its Manufactures: A Hand-book Exhibiting the Development, Variety, and Statistics of the Manufacturing Industry of Philadelphia in 1857. The section headed “Musical Instruments” says the following:
Patent Concertinos, a modification of the Accordeon, are manufactured by Mr. C. M. Zimmermann, who received a first premium at the World’s Fair in London.… The principal makers [of violins include] C. M. Zimmermann… There are two manufacturers of [drums]; one of whom has a patent contrivance for straining the head of the Drum to a uniform tightness. Mr. Zimmermann has large contracts with Government for his Military Drums. Tambourines and Banjos, as well as Musical Chairs, are made by him.
This list all but certainly conflates some of the instruments that C. M. Zimmermann manufactured with ones that he imported. The least doubt pertains to his drums. There is a gallery of them bearing his name here. His label illustrates the tensioning device patented in the US on 9 March 1858 (US19602) for “The Construction of Military Drums” but is not implemented on any of the ones in the gallery.
The “Patent Concertino” is presumably the small hexagonal concertina illustrated in a US patent issued to C. M. Zimmermann on 22 July 1856 for a “Valve of Accordions” (US15401). However, the original inventor of the claimed device was C. F. Zimmermann. He was also the recipient of an Exhibitors Medal at the London World’s Fair, where C. M. was not named in any associated document.
Freedley published a revised edition of his Handbook a decade later (discussed below) where C. M. and C. F. Zimmermann are more clearly conflated. It is therefore reasonable to guess that the earlier edition may also have confused C. M. Zimmermann, who was not otherwise known for making quality violins, with the Leipzig violin maker J. H. Zimmermann, whose instruments can have been imported to the Philadelphia shop.
As noted in his autobiography, C. F. Zimmermann contributed to the large-scale export of accordions and concertinas from Germany, which was a booming industry at the time. It would be surprising if his brother were not among the foreign importers and there is no corroborating evidence of C. M. actually having manufactured such instruments. If he was doing so nonetheless, C. F. would presumably have put the production facility to immediate use rather than restricting himself to the repair work he mentions having survived on, when ownership of the store was transferred to him.
That transition can be followed in McElroy’s Directory, where the name of the firm changed in the 1865 edition to “Zimmerman C. M. & Brother, 238 N 2d.” Charles Moritz withdrew entirely during the following year and the 1866 edition listed the music store as “Zimmermann C. F., 238 N 2d.” He placed the following advertisement for it in the revision of Freedley’s Handbook that covered activity during 1867.
Ironically, the ad following this one is for a piano factory co-owned by Richard T. Schmidt. Of greater substantive importance, the page after that updates the remarks in the 1857 Handbook, without noting the shift from C.M.Z. to C.F.Z. proprietorship.
Accordeons are made in several establishments, and it is claimed that the Philadelphia instruments are in every respect superior to the French or German. Their range of notes is double that of the Foreign Accordeon, and their construction is stronger. Mr. C. M. Zimmerman, who received the first premium at the World’s Fair, in London, has set forth the advantages and variety of his Accordeons so fully in another place, that it is unnecessary to repeat what is there said respecting them.
The descriptive text mentioned in the final sentence either was, or surely resembled, that provided in the preceding advertisement. The US patent for the Union Accordion was issued on the date indicated there, for an application filed on 28 December 1865 (US56319). It would be surprising if the international patents all shared the same date of issuance. The official abridgment of British patent no. 1866:2054 confirms that they, indeed, did not. The effective date of that patent was 9 August 1866, which would also have been the application date.
I have yet to locate any of the full international patent documents and don’t know which bear(s) the 29 January 1867 date but the British one was clearly ahead of that schedule. The abridgment heads it as being for “Accordions, concertinas, and like instruments” with a second section headed “Music notation.” There may be additional significance to the British patent having been co-issued to Zimmermann and the prominent banker J. H. Harjes, who was also a partner of J. P. Morgan.
If access to financial support can correctly be inferred from this, the rapid expansion in the scope of activity conducted at the North 2nd Street facility becomes easy to understand. The following photo shows C. F. Zimmermann with his staff in front of #238, now clearly a well-stocked music store.
The next dated description of the activity there is found under the heading “Musical Instrument Makers” in Gopsill’s Philadelphia City and Business Directory for 1868–1869.
ZIMMERMANN C. F., manufacturer of patented Union accordeons, and importer of and dealer in concertinos and accordeons, drums, fifes, violins, best German and Italian strings, 238 N 2d.
At some point during the ensuing decade he put the concertina ahead of the accordion, reverting to the priority sketched in the autobiography. Here is an advertisement that he placed in the edition of Kunkel’s Musical Review from September 1879.
The same ad appeared in the next two monthly issues. Zimmermann replaced it with a more extensive one in December 1879.
The list of instruments C. F. presented as being of his own manufacture more reflected C. M.’s production than what would be expected from C. F. himself. This may suggest a non-rigorous distinction between instruments made at his own facility and those made with his label at other locations. Regardless of where he was actually producing what, the latter ad brings a few new details into the discussion of his activity.
It provides the first dated direct association of C. F. Zimmermann’s name with zithers. They are not listed among the instruments he manufactured but he now clearly had a path of contact with one or more makers of them. There is no reason to expect mention of the autoharp in 1880 (also a plausible estimate for the date of the preceding photo). However, the ad was repeated regularly in Kunkel’s Review through the issue from December 1883.
This was two years after Zimmermann filed his patent application for that instrument (16 December 1881, issued as US257808 on 9 May 1882). Kunkel’s Review was published in St. Louis, Missouri, where the first attested reference to the public availability of autoharps is found in an advertisement in the 21 September 1884 issue of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (detailed in a previous post): “E. W. Muller instructs on piano, guitar, mendiline, zither, auto-harp, singing, etc.”
It is conceivable that Zimmermann subscribed to a three-year advertising run and then either forgot about it or simply didn’t (or couldn’t) alter the copy to reflect interim developments. At the other end of the speculative spectrum is the possibility that even as late as the end of the year before autoharps became available, Zimmermann was uncertain about how to exploit his patent commercially and was being quiet about it.
A further detail needs to be weighed into the assessment of that situation. In his autobiography, Zimmermann emphasized that he developed the autoharp because it was a better vehicle for his numerical system of notation than the accordion was. Crusading for the acceptance of that new system had become his life’s mission. It is therefore peculiar that he refrained from announcing the autoharp as early and widely as possible. The ad in Kunckel’s Review put the piano forward as the ideal platform for teaching by figures rather than staff notation, notwithstanding the patenting of the autoharp in the meanwhile.