Proximity and circumstance

One of the documents considered in the preceding post is a US trademark for the word Autoharp that Carl F. Zimmermann applied for in December 1892. This was just as he was finalizing the sale of his business with that instrument to Alfred Dolge. I posited that he might have done so as part of their transition agreement, perhaps in last-minute response to an imagined question asked by Dolge: “Are you telling me that you never trademarked the instrument at the heart of the operation I’m about to buy!?”

There was some urgency in wrapping up such details since the World’s Columbian Exposition (aka Chicago World’s Fair) was set to open on 5 May 1893. This was less than four months after Dolge formally incorporated the “C. F. Zimmermann Company of Dolgeville, New York” (28 January 1893). It was also long past the allocation of space to the US musical instrument industry in the exposition’s Liberal Arts Building.

The Official Guide treats the displayed musical instruments in a cursory manner but in-depth coverage is provided by the independently produced Musical Instruments at the World’s Columbian Exposition, edited by Frank D. Abbott and published in 1895. It includes a lengthy narrative about Dolge’s presence there, and the numerous awards that were given both directly to him and to other exhibitors whose products included the piano felt and soundboards for which he was renowned. He operated two booths, with the one emblazoned “Alfred Dolge & Son” befittingly grandiose.

He devoted the second booth to the “C. F. Zimmermann Company, Dolgeville, N.Y., U.S.A.” From the following photo, it might seem to be exclusively for autoharps but a piano (possibly fragmentary) was built into the display case. It was there to demonstrate the applicability of Zimmermann’s system of numerical music notation to both instruments. That system and the autoharp received separate awards, detailed below.

The relative size and location of these booths is seen in the following snippet of the floor plan. They are distant enough from each other to suggest that Zimmermann had made his own arrangements for the smaller one before commencing the sale of his business to Dolge. The shorter distance between it and the “PhonoHarp” display (the second directly above it) reflects a competition that was also introduced in the preceding post.

The exposed sides of the display case are filled with what Zimmermann termed small style autoharps, as well as a large model above the piano keyboard. That form derives directly from the one illustrated in an application for a US patent he filed on 10 December 1881, where the term “autoharp” is first attested. It was issued on 9 May 1882 (US257808), and he soon made several enhancements and modifications to it (detailed here). An advertisement from 1885 notes:

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.

The commentary about autoharps in Abbott’s book begins:

The Autoharp was shown in a great variety of styles, but it was principally the largest size, or Concert Grand Autoharp, which attracted universal attention. The fact that the Jury of Awards…showed the greatest interest, and especially mentioned…its great educational value and unlimited musical possibilities, must certainly be regarded as a great triumph for American progress in the manufacture of musical instruments.

This is followed by a drawing of a large autoharp notably different from the one visible in the display case. It appears above a photo of Zimmermann and opposite one of Dolge’s son, Rudolf.

It can reasonably be taken to depict the Concert Grand that was on exhibition and is seen again in publicity portraits of Dolge’s virtuoso employee, Aldis Gery, such as this one from October 1894.

This differs from the Concert Grand found in subsequent catalogs and related publications which, with significant musical (and typological) consequence, eliminates the four-string fretboard. The latter form implements a patent for a “Harp” that Gery and Rudolf Dolge applied for on 28 December 1893, as assignors to the Zimmermann Company — two months past the closing of the Columbian Exposition. The patent was issued on 5 June 1894 (US521109) and the preceding photo may signify that it did not go into production until after the picture was taken.

This patent claims mechanisms for shifting the positions of individual bars across the strings, and of the damping pads on a bar relative to each other. This makes it possible to produce what were vaunted as 72 different chords on a chromatically tuned instrument with only six bars. Pad shifters are also present on several of the small styles. Zimmermann had devised and implemented both shifting devices by the time of his 1885 ad, but sought no legal protection for them.

His large autoharps are discussed further in yet another earlier post, titled Two Gentlemen from Vogtland. One of them is Zimmermann and the other his arch-competitor Karl August Gütter. Both were behind instruments shown at the Columbian Exposition but Gütter figures only tacitly in its documentation, via the exhibitor Paul Stark with whom he held a number of patents.

The record of their collaboration starts with German Imperial Utility Model (Deutsche Reichs-Gebrauchsmuster) No. 315, issued jointly to them on 3 October 1891, for “Dampers through which specific harmonic string groups are opened on a zither” (Dämpfer mittels dessen bestimmte harmonische Saitengruppen von Zithern freigelegt werden). They then filed two essentially identical applications, one on 14 October 1891 for a British patent for Improvements relating to Zithers, and another on 12 November 1891 in the US for an Attachment to Zithers.

The US patent was issued first, on 16 August 1892 (US480750), followed by the British one on 27 August 1892 (GB1891017541). It is not certain that they are identical to the German utility model but the same drawings appear in both patents. They are labeled in German, corroborating an origin in Germany.

The claimed device places a series of small notches along the upper edge of a housing that contains a set of basic autoharp bars. Two retractable locking pins engage with the notches, permitting the aggregate to be moved across the strings. This enables a single bar to produce different chords, as do Zimmermann’s earlier devices.

However, Gütter’s design takes a different mechanical approach. Shifting the position of the bar housing realigns all damping pads in tandem relative to the chromatically tuned stringbed. This transposes the chord produced by each bar in semitone increments.

Paul Stark exhibited an implementation of this at the Columbian Exposition, in the area of the Liberal Arts Building allocated to the German musical instrument industry. It was presented as a “table harp” and received an award “for a moveable bar by which the number of chords can be increased to as many as ninety-six.”

The C. F. Zimmermann Company received a similar award for autoharps — “for originality and simplicity of the instrument, the musical possibilities of which are unlimited.” They also received an award for the “New System of representing music by figures and shorthand objects…for the originality and simplicity of system [sic] and its educational value, especially in connection with the autoharp.”

Abbott’s book introduces Paul Stark as “the head of the great exporting house at Markneukirchen, Saxony.” A showcase room there is illustrated in Stark’s catalog, taken below from the exposition edition. (Note the autoharps amid concert zithers in the upper left corner.)

The commentary on his booth continues:

…among the instruments displayed there were several which were marked by novelty of design as well as unsurpassed excellence of construction. Indeed, it was in the main this spirit of novelty, this genius of invention, that prompted Mr. Stark’s participation in the World’s Fair.…[O]ne of its specialties was pushed forward in the competitive display to the exclusion of others.

The one singled out was the table harp. Nothing is said about other zither-based innovations that may have been seen in the booth. One plausible candidate was an adaptation of the moveable bar housing to a chord-plate zither of the type that was doubtless the centerpiece of the PhonoHarp display.

On 21 July 1891, while their twinned GB/US patent applications were pending, Stark and Gütter filed a provisional specification for another British patent for Improvements in Stringed Instruments. It was issued before either of the others, on 18 July 1882 (GB1891012362). Its claims relate to the production of chords by shielding strings from being plucked, rather than by placing dampers on them.

Several patents for such devices were discussed in the preceding post, all employing a fixed shield plate with a varying numbers of slots for chords. The applications for them were filed in rapid succession, with the entry by Stark and Gütter in an early position. Their truly innovative contribution was the device for shifting the entire plate relative to the strings, enabling the production of a large number of chords with only three slots. They first illustrated this in the complete specification of the British patent, submitted on 19 April 1892.

The text on the patent drawing again indicates an earlier appearance in Germany. I’m still looking for dated evidence of it and the Stark-Gütter design may prove to be the first in the 1891–92 cluster of chord-plate zithers. The PhonoHarp was to become commercially ascendent among them but the label over the eponymous company’s display on the floor plan is the only mention of it in the examined documentation of the exposition.

NOTE

Becky Blackley includes another photograph of the Zimmermann Co. display in The Autoharp Book. It is not separated from the background as Abbott’s is and fits perfectly into the surrounding manufacturers’ booths as marked on the exposition floor plan. It also reveals clearer detail of the large autoharp. The book additionally presents another photo of Gery with a fretboard Concert Grand.