Piano keys helped wipe out Kenya's elephant herds
For a century, the white keys of pianos were faced with elephant ivory. A single Connecticut river valley once processed up to 90 percent of America's imported ivory, largely for keyboards, and demand for keys ravaged Kenyan herds in the early twentieth century. Pianos only abandoned ivory in the 1970s.
Ivory is mostly dentin, the hard tissue of teeth and tusks, laced with mineralised collagen. Elephants are the classic source, but mammoth, walrus, hippo, sperm whale, orca, narwhal and warthog ivory have all been worked, and even elk carry two small ivory teeth thought to be leftovers of ancestral tusks. The word traces back through the Latin ebur to the ancient Egyptian word for elephant.
People have prized it for millennia. The Harappan civilisation of the Indus Valley traded finished ivory goods such as combs, dice, pins and game pieces. Greeks and Romans carved religious objects and costly boxes and used ivory for the whites of statues' eyes; classical demand probably drove the elephants of Syria and North Africa to extinction. By the first century BC ivory travelled the Silk Road, and in Edo-period Japan craftsmen carved tiny netsuke toggles with animals and legendary beasts. In Southeast Asia it became official seals and the handles of kris daggers.
The industrial age multiplied demand. In the 1860s Deep River and Ivoryton in Connecticut became milling centres, cutting cutlery handles, buttons, billiard balls and above all keys. Killing on a vast scale supplied it: in 1930, gathering 40 tons required around 700 elephants. Later, mass-produced souvenirs and machine-carved Japanese name seals called hanko fed a crash in the 1980s, when Africa's elephants fell from about 1.3 million to roughly 600,000 in a decade.
Trade in ivory from threatened species such as African and Asian elephants is now illegal nationally and internationally. Substitutes arrived gradually, spurred by a billiard industry hunting for a manufactured alternative, and carvers now use synthetic ivory or tagua nuts. Smuggling persists: raw walrus tusks from the United States have been shipped illegally to Bali, carved and sold back to American buyers.
Source: Ivory
