Steinway & Sons, also known as Steinway, is a German-American piano company, founded in 1853 in New York City by German piano builder Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg. The company's growth led to a move to a larger factory in New York, and later opening an additional factory in Hamburg, Germany. The New York factory, in the borough of Queens, supplies the Americas, and the factory in Hamburg supplies the rest of the world.
Photograph of Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg
Steinway's factory in Manhattan, 1876
Steinway's factory in Hamburg, Germany, 1915
Crowd of spectators buying tickets for a Charles Dickens reading at the Steinway Hall in New York City, 1867
The piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when its keys are depressed, through engagement of an action whose hammers strike strings. Most pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, representing each note of the chromatic scale as they repeat throughout the keyboard's span of seven and a quarter octaves. There are 52 white keys, known as “naturals”, and 36 black keys, known as “sharps”. The naturals repeat a pattern of whole steps and half steps unique to any given starting note. These patterns define a diatonic scale. The 36 sharps repeat a pattern of whole steps and minor thirds, which defines a pentatonic scale.
Image: Steinway Vienna 002
Image: Piano droit Weinbach (2)
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The 1726 Cristofori piano in the Musikinstrumenten-Museum in Leipzig