When Was the Piano Invented? A Brief History of the Piano

The piano is younger than most people assume. The violin had already been around for about a hundred and fifty years before the first one was built, and unlike the violin, we know exactly who built it.

Who Invented the Piano?

The piano was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori, an Italian instrument maker born in Padua in 1655.

In 1688 he was hired by Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici to look after the Medici family’s harpsichords in Florence. That was the job: tuning, repairing, maintaining and moving a large collection of keyboard instruments. He was not a composer and he was not famous. He was the man who kept the instruments working, and he had a workshop and the time to think.

This is worth pausing on, because the violin has no equivalent. Ask who invented the violin and the honest answer is that nobody did, exactly. It emerged gradually in northern Italy across the early sixteenth century through the work of many makers. The piano is the opposite. One man, one workshop, one invention.

When and Where Was the Piano Invented?

In Florence, around 1700.

The firm evidence is an inventory of the Medici family’s musical instruments drawn up in 1700, which lists something new: “an arpicembalo by Bartolomeo Cristofori, of new invention, that makes the soft and the loud.” A court musician named Federigo Meccoli separately recorded the same year for the same instrument, which gives us two independent contemporary witnesses.

So the piano is about 325 years old.

Why you will see 1709 quoted everywhere

Search for this question and a great many sources, including some very reputable ones, will tell you 1709. That date comes from a different event. In 1709 the writer Scipione Maffei interviewed Cristofori and saw the instrument, and he published a description of it, complete with a diagram of the mechanism, in 1711.

1709 is when the piano was written about. 1700 is when the records show it already existed. You will also occasionally see 1698, which rests on a single diary whose authenticity scholars now doubt.

Why Is It Called a Piano?

Maffei called it a gravicembalo col piano e forte, which means “harpsichord with soft and loud.”

People got tired of saying that, so it was shortened to pianoforte, and then shortened again to piano. The instrument is named after what it could do rather than what it was, and the name we kept is the half that means “quiet.” The largest, loudest instrument in most houses is named with the Italian word for soft.

What Made It Different From a Harpsichord

A harpsichord plucks. Pressing a key lifts a wooden jack carrying a small quill, which catches the string on the way past and plucks it, rather like a tiny guitar pick. A pluck is a pluck. Press the key harder and you get the same volume.

A piano strikes. Pressing a key throws a hammer at the string. Throw it faster and the note is louder. Press gently and it is soft. That is the whole idea, and it is why a pianist can shape a phrase and a harpsichordist cannot.

There was an instrument that already responded to touch, the clavichord, but it was so quiet you could barely hear it from across a room. Cristofori’s achievement was getting volume and touch sensitivity in the same instrument.

The clever part: letting go

The obvious way to build this does not work. If the hammer stayed attached to the key, it would rest against the string after striking it and kill the sound instantly. You would get a thud.

Cristofori’s solution is called an escapement. A sprung lever drives the hammer most of the way to the string and then releases it, a fraction of an inch before contact. The hammer travels the last stretch on its own and bounces straight off, leaving the string ringing freely.

The way to explain it to a child is that you do not push a ball into a target. You throw it, and you let go before it arrives. Cristofori worked out how to make a key throw a hammer.

He added a second piece too, a check that catches the hammer as it rebounds so it cannot bounce back and hit the string a second time. That basic principle, a hammer released just before it strikes, is still how a piano works today.

The Oldest Piano That Still Exists

Three of Cristofori’s pianos survive. The oldest, built in 1720, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The others are in Rome, from 1722, and in Leipzig, from 1726.

The 1720 instrument has 54 keys. A modern piano has 88. It also sounds much closer to a harpsichord than to anything in a living room today, because the strings are thinner and the hammers harder.

Bach Complained, Then Sold Them

Maffei’s 1711 article was translated into German and reprinted in 1725, where it was almost certainly read by Gottfried Silbermann, an important organ builder in Saxony. Silbermann started making pianos in the 1730s.

Johann Sebastian Bach tried one around 1736 and did not like it. According to a contemporary account, he complained that the touch was too heavy and the treble too weak.

Silbermann kept working. By 1747, when Bach visited Frederick the Great at Potsdam and played the improved instruments there, he approved of them. Two years later he was acting as a sales agent. A receipt signed in Bach’s own hand, dated 9 May 1749, records him selling a “Piano et Forte” to a Polish count.

Bach’s first reaction to the piano was a complaint. His last was a sales receipt.

How It Became the Piano We Know

It took about seventy years for the piano to overtake the harpsichord. Johannes Zumpe’s small, affordable square pianos, made in London from 1766, did more than anything else to get them into ordinary homes. Broadwood built its last harpsichord in 1793.

The nineteenth century did the rest, and almost all of it follows from one invention: the cast-iron frame, patented by Alpheus Babcock in Boston in 1825 and applied to grand pianos by 1843. A wooden frame can only take so much pull. An iron one can take far more, which allows thicker strings at higher tension, which means a much bigger sound.

Everything else follows. Felt hammers arrived in 1826. Cross-stringing, which runs the bass strings diagonally over the others so they can be longer, was patented in the United States by Henry Steinway Jr. in 1859. Sébastien Érard’s double escapement of 1821 let a note be repeated before the key had fully returned, which is why fast repeated notes are possible at all. Piano makers settled on 88 keys during the 1880s and 1890s.

A modern grand holds around twenty tons of string tension, all the time. That is what the iron is for.

Three Things to Tell Your Child

The piano’s name means “quiet.” Its full name was “harpsichord with soft and loud,” and the bit we kept was the soft.

The oldest piano in the world is missing 34 keys. Cristofori’s 1720 instrument in New York has 54. The one at home has 88.

Even Bach changed his mind. He complained about the first piano he tried and was selling them thirteen years later.

A Note on the Violin

If the piano arrived around 1700, the violin had taken its modern shape in northern Italy somewhere between about 1520 and 1550. That is a head start of roughly a hundred and fifty years, and the oldest surviving instruments tell the same story: the oldest dated violin is from 1564, the oldest piano from 1720.

We have written about that story separately in a brief history of the violin, which is a rather different kind of history. Nobody signed the violin’s invention. Cristofori signed his.

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