The piano was invented by a Medici instrument keeper, and critics found it too quiet.
Around 1700, in Florence, Bartolomeo Cristofori built a harpsichord that could play soft and loud, depending on how hard you struck the keys. Hence its name: pianoforte. Its hammer mechanism was so ingenious that today's pianos still use an evolved version. Yet for decades, even its invention was credited to someone else.
Cristofori was born in Padua in 1655. We know little of his early life; the story that he apprenticed with the violin maker Nicolò Amati rests on a census entry that cannot be him. In 1688 Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, heir to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and a lover of music and machines, recruited him to Florence to care for his instruments, perhaps specifically as an inventor.
The first unambiguous record of the piano is a Medici inventory from 1700, describing an instrument 'of new invention that produces soft and loud'. The harpsichord plucks its strings, so pressing a key harder makes no difference. Cristofori's instrument struck them with hammers, and solved the hard problems this creates. The hammer had to be flung at the string and then fall away instantly, so it would not deaden the sound; the finger's movement had to be magnified, eight times over in his design; and the hammer must not bounce back for a second blow. His answers were so good that the modern piano action is a more complex descendant of his.
The reception was lukewarm. In 1711 the writer Scipione Maffei published an enthusiastic article, but admitted that some professionals found the tone too soft and dull; without a metal frame, Cristofori's light pianos could not match the harpsichord's volume. They were also expensive, so only royalty and the rich bought them. The piano only truly took off in the 1760s, when cheaper square pianos arrived.
After his death in 1731, Cristofori's name faded. In late 18th-century France the piano was believed to be the invention of the German builder Gottfried Silbermann, whose actions in fact relied almost entirely on Cristofori's design. Three of his pianos survive, all from the 1720s, in New York, Rome and Leipzig, each inscribed with the words 'Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, inventor'.
Source: Wikipedia — Bartolomeo Cristofori · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
