Grilled autoharps

24 February 202614 March 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

A lot of material about Charles F. Zimmermann has appeared on this blog. The present post revisits familiar documents but addresses details in them that have not received much attention here or elsewhere. In introductory review, Zimmermann coined the term “autoharp” in an application for a US patent headed “Harp,” filed on 10 December 1881, and issued as US257808 on 9 May 1882.

In it he claims to “have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Harps.” The ensuing description provides information not just about the instrument’s structural details, but also the intended playing technique. Zimmermann explains all aspects of his invention by reference to a (pedal) harp, except for its size and shape which are compared to a “common zither.”

The patent makes four specific claims, all relating to damping bars “arranged transversely across the strings thereof, and provided with depending teeth or fingers designed and adapted to come in contact with and silence or ‘cut out’ certain strings.” They serve two musical functions. In one, “the different trigger-bars render those strings silent which do not belong to the responsive chord.” The number of such bars can vary but the second function is served by a single bar, “placed transversely across the middle of the strings of the harp…so adjusted that when moved its triggers touch them lightly at such point, thereby producing the falsetto or flageolet tone.”

The patent drawings show how each bar moves axially against a single spring, and one of its claims is for bars “resting at one end against springs.” However, the description notes that:

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Musical Instruments

Harmony and disharmony

4 November 202428 January 2026 stringbed1 Comment

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.

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Musical Instruments

Herbert John Haddan

3 September 202414 May 2025 stringbedLeave a comment

The post before last made side-by-side comparisons of patents for “zither-like” musical instruments issued in Europe and the USA during the 1880s, attempting to clarify the priority of a few key innovations. The present text extends that discussion into the following decade from a slightly different perspective. It is centered on the role played by an unsung participant whose name provides the title above.

Herbert John Haddan (1838–1911) was a well reputed British patent agent who served inventors in many fields. His involvement with musical instruments began no later than 1877, when he obtained a British patent on behalf of an American violin designer, doing so again in 1879 for one located in Germany. He went on to represent instrument makers on both sides of a growing transatlantic competition in the development of chord bar devices of the type now primarily associated with the autoharp. There were signals, throughout, of his having understood the musical instrument industry beyond the legalities of obtaining patents.

Before delving into specifics, a few general observations about the patenting process may be helpful. They are issued by national authorities and acquiring one in a given country confers no protection in any other. An inventor wanting international coverage needs a separate patent in each country where protection is sought. Legislation and procedures vary from country to country and time to time, as does the scope of a patent.

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Musical Instruments

The Two Gentlemen of Vogtland

4 June 202415 February 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

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.

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Musical Instruments

De Good Autoharp

13 September 202214 May 2025 stringbedLeave a comment

I’ve taken the summer off from blogging, tending instead to academic commitments and catching up on overdue reading and research. One of the areas I’ve been drawn into is the use of numeric, mnemonic, and letter-based alternatives to staff notation in the teaching of music. This has been a contentious topic in writing on the theory of Western music ever since the emergence of staff notation many centuries ago. The initial primary concern was how best to help unskilled singers gauge the size of intervals in vocal performance. In the late-18th century interest was additionally turned toward the desirability of music being printable using systems that “bring all its characters within the compass of a common fount of printing-types.”

The design of musical instruments expressly intended to bolster the pedagogical process became a focus of innovative activity that can be traced back at least to 1830. This was targeted both to use in schools and supporting members of church congregations in psalmody. Charles Zimmermann developed his autoharp with tutorial intent, incorporating a system for numbering the strings and the corresponding steps of a scale that could be indicated in simplified printed music. He also devised lesser known schemes for the similar notation of music for the button accordion and labeling the piano keyboard.

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Musical Instruments

Passing the bar exam

1 April 202214 May 2025 stringbed2 Comments

This post takes another look at the often blurry lines separating what are regarded as categorically distinct types of chord zithers. The focus this time is on variant forms of the autoharp that branched off before it had fully acquired its current identity. The baseline is an unmechanized fretless zither, tuned to a continuous scale that can be anything from single-key diatonic to fully chromatic.

It becomes an autoharp by the attachment of a battery of movable bars with damping pads — but there’s more to it. Adding that the pads on a given bar have to be arranged to mute the strings that don’t belong to a specified chord still doesn’t cover everything. The lock bars now commonplace on two- and three-key diatonic autoharps mute strings that don’t belong to a specified scale, rather than chord. Systems that produce chords by pressing two bars simultaneously entail further variation, so it is also necessary to distinguish between one type of bar and another.

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Musical Instruments

Zither accordions

23 February 20224 March 2026 stringbedLeave a comment

For decades, my day job gave regular need for bridging the gaps between the academically derived terminologies used for the labeling and classification of musical instruments in museum collections, the craft-oriented vocabularies of musical instrument makers, and the freer glossary used by musicians. I was deeply embroiled in what remains lively controversy about classification systems and am finding it increasingly difficult to steer clear of that topic on this blog.

At the moment, though, it seems to be something of a “Patent of the Month Club.” The nomenclature applied to the description of musical instruments in the reported documents varies widely and wildly, and is often severely at odds with that accepted in explicitly music-oriented contexts. Dealing with this is keeping the terminologist in me happily occupied. The present installment also provides a springboard into the discussion of tuning and tuning systems, which is another topic that I’ve been saying less about than I ultimately intend to.

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Musical Instruments

Patent misrepresentation of patents

19 January 202214 May 2025 stringbedLeave a comment

The history of fretless zithers is replete with inventions intended to ease the production of chords, first patented in one country and then claimed by someone else shortly thereafter, in a patent issued in another country. When the dates are close enough, it can be difficult to determine who should be credited with the actual innovation. Similarities do sometimes appear to be coincidental but plagiarism was common enough.

The assessment of such situations can be made more difficult by the widespread practice of marking an instrument with the date and number of the first patent issued for it, even if the model at hand incorporates details that do not figure in that patent. One frequently cited example is the way Charles F. Zimmermann applied the number and date of a well-known patent US257808 issued to him in the United States on 9 May 1882.

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