There have been other and saner variations of sound-board construction. It has been suggested that the use of a double board composed of two cross-grained thicknesses glued to each other would obviate the necessity of ribbing and increase the power of resonance. There seems to be little doubt that there is the germ of a valuable idea in this, and if the notion is properly worked out, it will very likely produce valuable additions to our knowledge of the phenomena of resonance.
Unusual ideas have been less frequent in the domain of action-making. There have been several praiseworthy attempts to get rid of the troublesome, but hitherto necessary, tape in the upright action. The patent of Leo Battalia is one of these. He abolishes the tape and bridle wire, and substitutes a two-branched spring fork projecting from the jack. One branch works in a slot cut in the hammer butt and the other bears against the back check. The back stop is done away with and excellent repetition is assured, superior to that which is obtained by ordinary methods.
In the domain of pure scale design, we note the ever present and perennial notion of sympathetic strings. This idea has taken various forms. The most conventional development is, of course, the “duplex scale” of Steinway and others. This utilizes the waste ends of the strings and scales off lengths of them that correspond to aliquot parts of the vibrating length of each string, thus obtaining the advantage of sympathetic partial tones. Most of the ideas in this direction have gone further than this, however. Some makers have gone so far as to have a fourth string tuned to the octave of every three-string group. But this is surely unnecessary when we consider that the octave is, on the pianoforte, the strongest partial tone of any musical sound, and least of all needs adventitious aid.
There are many other similar devices used and unused that we should waste our time in considering. In any case the true test of the utility of an invention is use, and each one of these unusual notions that have been put on the market would have been universal long ago had they been uniformly practical and valuable.
We cannot close this hasty survey without mention of the remarkable innovation in action mechanism devised by Mr. Morris Steinert. Here the forcible hammer-blow is superseded by a gradual push on the hammer at the strings, executed through the interposition of an articulated double lever between the hammer and the jack. The result is to produce a different form of hammer attack and a noticeable modification in the coloring of the tone produced from the string. While the claims of the inventor are somewhat exaggerated, there is no doubt that Mr. Steinert has hit upon a valuable variation in the method of actuating the hammer, and his invention opens up new prospects of pleasure to the pianist.