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Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann

Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann (17 June 1805 –1 October 1864) was a German musical instrument maker, often credited with inventing the harmonica and sometimes the accordion.

Biography

Thuringia

Buschmann was born in Friedrichroda, Thuringia. His father, Johann Buschmann, was a pipe organ builder, who in 1816 developed the terpodion, a friction instrument played either with wooden hammers or sometimes with a piano-like keyboard, based on the same principle as the glass harmonica. From 1819 Johann took Friedrich with him on his frequent journeys.

Berlin

In the first half of 1821 Johann Buschmann travelled to London, accompanied by his son Friedrich, and agreed a £1,000 contract with a Mr. Löschmann besides taking other orders for terpodions. On their return the Buschmanns set up a workshop in Berlin, where Friedrich, aged 16, was already skilled and experienced enough at musical instrument construction to begin building terpodions on the basis of written instructions from his father.

Altogether, 25 terpodions were built, most of them by Friedrich. His brother Eduard worked mainly on the wooden cases and inlays, and was in charge of the appearance of the instruments, though the brothers lived and worked in different German cities. Nearly all the terpodions ever built are still in existence in different European museums.

Johann and Eduard meanwhile continued their advertising journeys throughout Europe. Besides their performances, they had to service the instruments they had already sold, as they did not function very reliably over a longer period. This may well have been a principal reason why Friedrich was looking for other methods of reliable sound generation for tuning purposes. It is certain that they must have become aware of all kinds of modern developments in this area as they travelled through different countries, which contributed to Friedrich's further refinement of the physharmonica.

In Berlin in 1828 Friedrich built an instrument, originally intended only for use as a tuning aid, which at first consisted of 21 different metal free reeds fastened to a wooden block in such a way that it was possible to blow the reeds individually. He then experimented further by fastening the reeds inside a small box "4 inches square and equally high" (in other words a cubic box with 4" sides), each of which could be made to vibrate by blowing through 21 individual "tone chambers" (Tonlochkanzellen). This instrument he named an aeoline.

The earliest experiments with the aeoline may have taken place in 1824, when it has been claimed that Buschmann built a tuning aid named an aura, about 4 inches long and equipped with 15 reed tongues. (The name Aura was also then in use in German to mean a Jew's harp).

In Buschmann's letters to his uncle, brother, and father it appears that he built a bigger version of an aeoline in 1829, with bellows and piano keyboard, which, being about the size of a small writing desk, was still much smaller than any comparable fixed key instrument they had built previously.

The Buschmanns certainly knew of an instrument built at about this time by Johann Caspar Schlimbach, an instrument maker trained in Vienna, and his cousin Bernhard Eschenbach in Königshofen in Bavaria: this was a pianoforte with an aeoline register. Schlimbach made no attempt to protect his invention, but freely showed the instrument to everyone who wanted to see it, with the inevitable result that a number of people patented very similar instruments in Vienna. Indeed, Buschmann's father Johann wrote in a letter of 30 October 1829 that he was thinking of taking out a patent for the new instrument in Bavaria.

Hamburg

In 1833 Buschmann married and moved to Hamburg, where he opened a new workshop of his own. There he made mostly physharmonicas, bellows-operated wind instruments, each of which also had a large manual keyboard. For a physharmonica with built-in terpodion he won the great gold medal at the Hamburg Arts and Trades Exhibition of 1838. He died in Hamburg in 1864.

The harmonica

There is a persistent legend that Buschmann invented the harmonica (and the accordion) but this cannot be substantiated. Buschmann states in a letter of 1828 that he had just invented a new instrument, but the manufacture of harmonicas had begun some years previously in Vienna: "There is documentary evidence that harmonicas were being sold in Vienna in 1825..."

Nor, in his impressively well-documented family history, was Buschmann able to confirm the story (see Sources).

Notes

References

"In aller Munde": Mundharmonika - Handharmonika - Harmonium: Eine 200-jährige Erfolgsgeschichte. Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, 2002. ISBN 3-922378-20-X
Buschmann, Prof. Heinrich, 1938. Christian Friedrich Ludwig Buschmann, der Erfinder der Mund- und der Handharmonika : Ein Beitr. zur Geschichte dieser Musikinstrumente mit Benutzg d. Familienarchivs d. Enkels Ludwig Buschmann, Instrumentenbauer in Hamburg. Trossingen/Württ.: Hohner A. G.