154 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



best account appeared in LittelVs Living Age, No. 329, written by 

 Hon. S. A. Eliot, and it is from this that the following description is 

 taken. 



The difficulty of tuning fixed instruments with only twelve sounds 

 to the octave, so that the same pipe, or the same string, of one uni- 

 form pitch, shall fit all keys in which music may be written, is so 

 great, that it is set down as an impossibility, which in truth it is. 

 Twelve sounds cannot be made equivalent to fifty. But it has also 

 been deemed an impossibility to construct an organ, or a piano, so 

 that it may produce the whole fifty-three commas of an octave, and 

 yet be subject to the control of a single pair of hands. Several at- 

 tempts have been made to attain this object without success ; and at 

 last it has come to be regarded as a settled impossibility. It is mani- 

 fest that the extreme difficulty of producing nice gradations of sound 

 upon a string of ten or twelve inches in length, such as those of the 

 violin, will be greatly diminished upon those of the piano-forte, which 

 range from one foot to five or six feet in length ; or in the pipes of 

 the organ, so many of which are longer yet, and where the two di- 

 mensions of length and diameter are equally important, in the produc- 

 tion of the required variety of tones. But the difficulty does not con- 

 sist principally in the production of the great number of sounds. That 

 can be done with the utmost exactness by regulating on mathematical 

 calculation the vibrations of the string, or the capacity of the pipe, 

 when they are of the proper length and size for a piano-forte or an 

 organ. The difficulty is to adjust the mechanical apparatus which is 

 necessary to produce the precise vibrations which are wanted for a 

 given piece of music, so that they can be used with all the rapidity 

 which is desirable. 



This has been accomplished at last, in a single instance, but on a 

 principle which can be applied indefinitely without risk of failure, and 

 which makes the single instance decisive, therefore, of immense prog- 

 ress. An organ has been constructed with five stops, and furnished 

 with the requisite number of pipes to give perfectly the chords in all 

 music written in eleven different keys, viz., in the natural key, and in 

 any key of not more than five sharps or five flats. Music in six, or 

 seven, or more of either flats or sharps, cannot be performed with exact- 

 ness on this instrument. To the extent named it is mathematically 

 exact ; the harmony it produces is true, and the effect on the ear singu- 

 larly delightful. In tuning a common organ or piano by equal tempera- 

 ment, the imperfection of the divisions of the octave is distributed, as 

 well and as equally as it can be, among all the tones ; i. e. none are 

 mathematically exact. If the third were made precisely accurate, the 

 fifth would be farther from an exact chord than if the one be a little 

 sharped, and the other a little flatted, and so of other intervals. The 

 consequence is that no two strings of a piano, and no two pipes of an 

 organ are in perfect tune. They sound more or less discordantly. 

 But with the new construction of the organ this is not so. There are 

 pipes enough to give every sound required in eleven keys with abso- 

 lute exactness. Not only docs this instrument produce perfect com- 

 binations within itself, instead of imperfect ones, but it is capable of 



