Walter Broadwood shows me that 1831 was really the time, and
that Boehm employed Gerock and Wolf, of 79 Cornhill, London, musical
instrument makers, to carry out his experiment. Gerock being opposed
to an oblique direction of the strings and hammers, Boehm found a more
willing coadjutor in Wolf. As far as I can learn, a piccolo, a cabinet,
and a square piano were thus made overstrung. Boehm's argument was that
a diagonal was longer within a square than a vertical, which, as he
said, every schoolboy knew. The first overstrung grand pianos seen in
London were made by Lichtenthal, of St. Petersburg; not so much for tone
as for symmetry of the case; two instruments so made were among the
curiosities of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Some years before this,
Henry Pape had made experiments in cross stringing, with the intention
to economize space. His ideas were adopted and continued by the London
maker, Tomkisson, who acquired Pape's rights for this country. The iron
framing in a single casting is a distinctly American invention, but
proceeding, like the overstringing, from a German by birth. The iron
casting for a square piano of the American Alpheus Babcock, may have
suggested Meyer's invention; it was, however, Conrad Meyer, who,
in Philadelphia, and in 1833, first made a real iron frame square
pianoforte.
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