The International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures was held in Philadelphia in 1876, celebrating the centennial anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. It was a massive undertaking and the Main Hall alone had more floor space than any other building then in the world. The accompanying documentation was prodigious, ranging from formal reports and directories, to independently prepared narratives.

The host city made an extensive, if not to say disproportionate, contribution to the US utilization of that space. A particularly detailed description of the event, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition, 1876, (online here) says this about it:

A peculiar feature of this important portion of the Exhibition is the noticeable frequency with which one meets exhibits from Philadelphia houses…fully two-thirds of the best American exhibits are the result of the well-known energy and enterprise of Philadelphians…and whatever may explain the circumstance, there is no doubt that much energy is displayed.

Continue reading “Inspirational events” →

One of the most widely known details about the history of the autoharp is that its name first appeared in an application for a US patent filed by Charles Zimmerman on 10 December 1881, and issued on 9 May 1882. Seeing an autoharp mentioned in an advertisement in the 21 September 1884 issue of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat is therefore unsurprising.

E. W. Muller instructs on piano, guitar, mendiline, zither, auto-harp, singing, etc.: a lodging-room in exchange for instructions.

This also provides a concrete date by which the autoharp had come into circulation, pushing the generally accepted estimate back from 1885. There is a useful clue about the model that Muller owned in the section headed “Criminal Notes” in the 16 February 1885 edition of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. This also corroborates the prior familiarity of the instrument’s name.

Continue reading “The value of $50” →