Today, a lesson in invention from the Far
Side. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Do you know Gary Larson? He
does those neat Far Side cartoons. Larson
has a marvelous eye for dark absurdity: Two spiders
have spun a web across the bottom of a child's
slide. One says to the other, "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings."
So I did a double take when I saw one about a
caveman carving a piano out of a rock. A small side
note said the piano was actually invented in 1709.
That seemed far too early, but Larson has all the
instincts of a scholar, and he's a good jazz
musician to boot.
Anyone who listens to much classical music knows
the early pianoforte was the instrument of Mozart,
Haydn and Beethoven in the late 18th century. And
the greatest harpsichord composer, Domenico
Scarlatti, died in 1757 -- a half century after
Larson's date. Still, if you can't trust Gary
Larson, whom can you trust?
When I went looking, I found a surprising story
about technological change. Starting in 1698,
Bartolomeo Cristofori, keeper of the Medici musical
instruments, began work on a machine that would
combine features of the harpsichord and the
When you press a harpsichord key, a mechanism
plucks a string. Cristofori created a complex
mechanism that would hammer the string
instead, then damp the sound. That advantage would
forever change the character of keyboard music. For
now you could play both loudly and softly,
depending on how you touched the key. Hence the new
name pianoforte, which literally means soft
Cristofori's mechanism was a mechanical marvel. It
all but eliminated any time delay in the hammers,
and it kept the hammers from bouncing back to hit
the string a second time. But his marvel didn't
travel very far. And composers like Scarlatti kept
right on writing for harpsichords.
European makers eventually began looking for
a loud-soft keyboard instrument. When they did,
they had to reinvent much of Cristofori's piano.
Pianofortes didn't come into general use until
composers felt the need for new and larger sounds.
Mozart eventually wrote both for the new clarinet
and for the new pianofortes. But that was long
after Cristofori. Beethoven's music reflected the
evolution of the piano into its near-modern form,
with double and triple strings exerting
eighteen-ton loads on massive steel frames.
The piano was thus invented and then laid aside
until we were ready for its grander sound. Mozart
may've contributed to the process when he pioneered
the listener subscription concert. Music had to
move out of Medici palaces into large public halls
where a harpsichord is useless. Users are part of
any invention, and it took them until the
Industrial Revolution to lay claim on the modern
industrial-strength piano that we all know.
So Gary Larson had it right. Now if someone could
just tease Larson out of retirement so we could
have Far Side cartoon commentary on our new
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds