A recent post on this blog discussed how the accordion and concertina maker, Carl Friedrich Zimmermann, made his way in 1864 from the German town of Carlsfeld to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He did so to take over the operation of a music store from his brother, Charles Moritz Zimmermann. The post that followed it examined Carl’s activity there during the ensuing decades. The present one wraps this series up by considering events surrounding his retirement.
The 1870 United States Census records a household two doors away from that store, headed by Carl Zimmermann with his wife Sophia and ten children. His occupation was “Imp[orter of] Musical Instruments.” The 16-year-old Charles and the one year younger Alexander, both “Work in a Music Store.”
The 1880 US Census records Carl Zimmermann as a “Dealer in Musical Ins[truments]” and Charles as a “Clerk in a Store.” The family now resided above their music store at 238 North Second Street, seen in the following photograph.
Carl is on the sidewalk in front and it is presumably Sophia on the balcony. Charles is all but certain to be one of the trio on the steps. If the photo was taken before Alexander ’s untimely death in December 1876, he is similarly likely to be in that group. Judging from the hints of family resemblance and relative age, I would guess that Charles is at Carl’s left shoulder. For comparison, here is the proprietor closer to his own youth.
The 1890 census documents were destroyed in a fire but the ones from 1900 record Charles as the head of his own household in Philadelphia, employed as a “Book-keeper.” His father sold what had become a thriving autoharp business near the end of 1892, at the age of 74, which was then moved to New York.
The name “C. G. Zimmermann” appears as a witness on a US patent dated 2 August 1870, issued to “Carl Friedrich Zimmermann” for an Improvement to Accordions (US106018). “Charles Gustav Zimmermann” submitted a US patent application for an identically dimensioned alternative to the autoharp but with a different mechanism, on 12 January 1892 (discussed in detail below).
This cannot have been long before Carl began negotiating the sale of his business to Alfred Dolge, if it was not already underway. This raises a question about whether Charles’s initiative was intended to bolster the family enterprise or marked his separation from it. The issue of the Music Trade Review from 10 December 1892 makes this comment on the corporate sale (confusingly referring to Carl as “Charles F.”; a name under which he also did business):
Some of the papers are giving considerable publicity to a statement claiming that Chas. F. Zimmermann had commenced suit against Alfred Dolge for the recovery of his business. The plain facts in the case are as follows: Mr. Dolge arranged with Mr. Zimmermann for the sale and removal of the latter’s establishment to Dolgeville. This, at the time of arrangement between the contracting parties, was perfectly suitable to Mr. Zimmermann, but some of the members of his family were dissatisfied with the transaction, and not knowing Mr. Dolge commenced suit hastily. When they investigated the transaction the suit was withdrawn, and the business was carried on without interruption.
“Charles F. Zimmermann” filed a US trademark application for the word “Autoharp” on 22 December 1892 (no. 22,339 issued on 17 January 1893), having used it continuously in his business since 9 May 1882, when his patent for the so-named instrument was issued (US257808). The application also notes that he used the trademark in international commerce “particularly with England.” It is unclear whether this seemingly redundant registration was part of the transition plan agreed upon with Dolge (perhaps to assert the prior British nexus, about which more will be said in a separate post), or was intended to clarify his authority over the transaction that unnamed members of his family had petitioned the court to stop.
Sophia Wilhelmine Zimmermann passed away in June 1886. This makes it easy to imagine Charles Gustav acting on a desire to be promoted to full control over the business in which he had long participated, garnering support from some of his siblings. Conversely, if Carl Friedrich felt that his heir apparent was gearing up to become a competitor, he can plausibly have decided to sell out and preempt any further unwelcome challenge.
There are additional equally likely speculative scenarios. Whatever the actual sequence of events may have been, Alfred Dolge formally incorporated the “C. F. Zimmermann Company of Dolgeville, New York” on 28 January 1893. With that, he acquired all of the entrepreneurial headaches its namesake was now quit. These included copycat patents that barely changed the design of the autoharp, through a range of innovative modifications, and on to fundamentally different fretless zithers — all vying for the same market.
The patent issued to Charles Gustav Zimmermann lies on that spectrum. It was, in turn, one in a sequence issued to different people for glaringly similar designs. The order of those patents is detailed in a previous post that stops short of his contribution, with a promise to revisit it.
That’s the next subject of the present text. During its preparation the earlier one was revised significantly, apportioning new source material as appropriate to both. If this one is of interest, the other should also prove worthwhile (re)reading. I’ll also reprise a few details from it below.
The first is from a German Imperial patent headed Zither, applied for by Theodor Meinhold on 1 May 1887 and published as DE42967 on 6 April 1888. This illustrates numerous devices, of which the following one is for a correlate to the chord bars on an autoharp. It consists of a fixed metal plate with openings that permit the strings belonging to a given chord to be plucked in a single sweeping motion, while shielding the strings that do not belong to it.
The second is from a US patent application titled Harp, filed on 27 January 1891 by “William W. Batchelder Jr…assignor of one half to Joseph R. Green.” It was issued as US456977 on 4 August 1891.
On the date of its issuance, “William Washington Batchelder, Junior, Piano-tuner…and Joseph Richardson Green, Piano Merchant,” both located in Boston, Massachusetts, filed a substantively identical British patent application for Improvements in Harps or Zithers, issued as GB1891013203 on 5 September 1891.
Finally, here is the drawing from the patent for a Musical Instrument that Charles Gustav Zimmermann applied for on 12 January 1892, issued as US471370 on 22 March 1892. It instantiates the same functionally as the preceding two but positions the chord plate so that all strings can be damped, or plucked melodically, on either side of it.
This was manufactured and marketed as the “Harmony Harp” in models with varying numbers of chords. The one closest to the patent drawing is No. 3A, seen in the following photograph of an exemplar in the Rick Meyers Collection of Fretless Zithers.
One month after the patent was issued to Charles Zimmermann, on 27 April 1892, the “Phonoharp Company” was incorporated in Berwick, Maine. It came to produce a broad range of fretless zithers of fundamentally different designs, and used the name Phonoharp to designate those with a chord plate. The Model 2 Phonoharp most closely matches Batchelder’s patent drawing. The following specimen is also in the collection of Rick Meyers, to whom I am most grateful for making these photos available.
A model that differed more significantly from the patented form was marketed as a Phonoharp before Batchelder’s patent was issued and was kept in production by the eponymous company. Some intriguing questions attach to the circumstances of its first appearance, not least how it was both influenced by, and influenced, Meinhold’s work. This is discussed and illustrated in the revised version of the earlier post noted above.
There are differences in how Batchelder, Meinhold, and Zimmermann initially formed their chord plates but they lack functional or musical significance. Meinhold was clearly its original inventor and the others all settled on his basic design. The German patent protection he acquired for it was without consequence in US jurisdiction. The same pertained vice versa to the innovations his colleagues had patented in the US.
It is readily understandable that Meinhold and Batchelder were making direct commercial assaults on Carl F. Zimmermann’s autoharp. However, this is not something that would be expected from within his own organization. As already noted, Charles Gustav can have been acting on behalf of the family business by acquiring a patent for the chord plate alternative, to avert the threat posed by the nascent Phonoharp Company.
This is corroborated by the identical body dimensions of the autoharp and Harmony Harp, plus the appearance of Carl’s numerical notation on the chord plate. It is seen with particular clarity on a No. 5A Harmony Harp, yet again in the Meyers Collection.
This made the instrument immediately accessible to people familiar with the instruction books and sheet music for the autoharp in which that notation appeared. Nonetheless, the soundhole label suggests no link to a preexisting enterprise. Taken with the events noted above, it would be as reasonable to conclude that Charles Gustav Zimmermann was establishing himself as an independent instrument maker.
No matter how he got there, he was left to compete with the Dolge and Phonoharp companies. The latter ultimately gained control over the production and marketing of all types of fretless zithers mentioned above, and others.
I have one of those, but called a “Harmolin”