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Æolian Company
The Aeolian Company was a musical-instrument making firm whose products included player organs, pianos, sheet music, records and phonographs. Founded in 1887, it was at one point the world's largest such firm. During the mid 20th century, it surpassed Kimball to become the largest supplier of pianos in the United States, having contracts with Steinway & Sons due to its Duo-Art system of player pianos. It went out of business in 1985. History The Aeolian Company was founded by New York City piano maker William B. Tremaine as the ''Aeolian Organ & Music Co.'' (1887) to make automatic organs and, after 1895, as the ''Aeolian Co.'' automatic pianos as well. The factory was initially located in Meriden, Connecticut. Tremaine had previously founded the Mechanical Orguinette Co. in 1878 to manufacture automated reed organs. The manufacture of residence or "chamber" organs to provide entertainment in the mansions of millionaires was an extremely profitable undertaking, and Aeolian virtua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aeolian Hall (Manhattan)
The Aeolian Building is a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, at 29–33 West 42nd Street and 34 West 43rd Street, just north of Bryant Park. The 1912 building was the fourth headquarters of the Aeolian Company, which manufactured pianos and other musical instruments. the 18-story building contained the 1,100-seat Aeolian Hall (1912–1927), a top concert hall of its day. The building stands next to the Grace Building. History The building, on the site of the Latting Tower, a popular observatory during the 19th century, was designed by the architects Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore and completed in 1912. Its name refers to the Aeolian Company, which manufactured pianos. It is high and has 18 floors. In mid-1922, the company sold the building to the Schulte Cigar Stores Company for over $5 million. From 1961 to 1999, the building housed the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and today houses the State University of New York's College of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tapestries
Tapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven by hand on a loom. Tapestry is weft-faced weaving, in which all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work, unlike most woven textiles, where both the warp and the weft threads may be visible. In tapestry weaving, weft yarns are typically discontinuous; the artisan interlaces each coloured weft back and forth in its own small pattern area. It is a plain weft-faced weave having weft threads of different colours worked over portions of the warp to form the design. Tapestry is relatively fragile, and difficult to make, so most historical pieces are intended to hang vertically on a wall (or sometimes in tents), or sometimes horizontally over a piece of furniture such as a table or bed. Some periods made smaller pieces, often long and narrow and used as borders for other textiles. European tapestries are normally made to be seen only from one side, and often have a plain lining added on the back. However, other traditi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Piano Company
American Piano Company (Ampico) was an American piano manufacturer formed in 1908 through the merger of Wm. Knabe & Co., Chickering & Sons, and Foster-Armstrong. They later purchased the Mason & Hamlin piano company as their flagship piano. The merger created one of the largest American piano manufacturers. In 1932, it was merged with the Aeolian Company to form Aeolian-American Co. Reproducing pianos From 1914, American Piano was one of the leading producers of player pianos, most notably their reproducing player known as the Ampico. The Ampico reproducing player piano was able to capture all the expression of the original performance, with dynamics and fine nuances other devices could not reproduce. Their main competitors in reproducing players were the Aeolian Duo-Art (1913) and Welte-Mignon (1905). The player piano and reproducing Ampico mechanism was originally designed by Charles Fuller Stoddard (1876–1958) with Dr. Clarence Hickman joining the company in the mid-1920s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aeolian-Skinner
Æolian-Skinner Organ Company, Inc. of Boston, Massachusetts was an American builder of a large number of pipe organs from its inception as the Skinner Organ Company in 1901 until its closure in 1972. Key figures were Ernest M. Skinner (1866–1960), Arthur Hudson Marks (1875–1939), Joseph Silver Whiteford (1921-1978), and G. Donald Harrison (1889–1956). The company was formed from the merger of the Skinner Organ Company and the pipe organ division of the Æolian Company in 1932. Skinner period The Skinner & Cole Company was formed in 1902 as a partnership of Ernest Skinner and Cole, another former Hutchings-Votey employee. By 1904 the partnership had dissolved, and the "Ernest M. Skinner & Company" purchased the Skinner and Cole assets, in the form of the contract for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity in New York CityOpus 113, 190Holy Trinity Lutheran Church Organ History (Accessed 25 Dec 2010) from the former company for $1. Between 1904 and 1910, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Depression In The United States
In the United States, the Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and then spread worldwide. The nadir came in 1931–1933, and recovery came in 1940. The stock market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth as well as for personal advancement. Altogether, there was a general loss of confidence in the economic future. The usual explanations include numerous factors, especially high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted overoptimistic loans by banks and investors, and the lack of high-growth new industries. These all interacted to create a downward economic spiral of reduced spending, falling confidence and lowered production. Industries that suffered the most included construction, shipping, mining, logging, and agriculture. Also hard hit was the manufacturing of durable goods like automobiles and appliances, whose purc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Longwood Gardens
Longwood Gardens is a botanical garden that consists of over 1,077 acres (436 hectares; 4.36 km2) of gardens, woodlands, and meadows in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, United States in the Brandywine Creek Valley. It is one of the premier horticultural display gardens in the United States and is open to visitors year-round to enjoy native and exotic plants and horticulture (both indoor and outdoor), events and performances, seasonal and themed attractions, as well as educational lectures, courses, and workshops. History Longwood Gardens has a long varied history. For thousands of years, the native Lenni Lenape tribe fished its streams, hunted its forests, and planted its fields. Evidence of the tribe's existence is found in quartz spear points that have been discovered on and around the property and can be found on display in the Peirce-du Pont House on the Longwood Gardens property. In 1700, a Quaker farmer named George Peirce purchased 402 acres of this English-claimed l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James Buchanan Duke established The Duke Endowment and the institution changed its name to honor his deceased father, Washington Duke. The campus spans over on three contiguous sub-campuses in Durham, and a marine lab in Beaufort. The West Campus—designed largely by architect Julian Abele, an African American architect who graduated first in his class at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design—incorporates Gothic architecture with the Duke Chapel at the campus' center and highest point of elevation, is adjacent to the Medical Center. East Campus, away, home to all first-years, contains Georgian-style architecture. The university administers two concurrent schools in Asia, Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore (established in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gennett Records
Gennett (pronounced "jennett") was an American record company and label in Richmond, Indiana, United States, which flourished in the 1920s. Gennett produced some of the earliest recordings by Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, and Hoagy Carmichael. Its roster also included Jelly Roll Morton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and Gene Autry. History Gennett Records was founded in Richmond, Indiana, by the Starr Piano Company. It released its first records in October 1917. The company was named for its managers: Harry, Fred and Clarence Gennett. The company had produced early recordings under the Starr Records label. The early issues were vertically cut in the gramophone record grooves, using the hill-and-dale method of a U-shaped groove and sapphire ball stylus, but they switched to the lateral cut method in April 1919. Gennett set up recording studios in New York City and later, in 1921, set up a second studio on the grounds of the piano factory in Richmond ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brunswick Records
Brunswick Records is an American record label founded in 1916. History From 1916 Records under the Brunswick label were first produced by the Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company, a company based in Dubuque, Iowa which had been manufacturing products ranging from pianos to sporting equipment since 1845. The company first began producing phonographs in 1916, then began marketing their own line of records as an afterthought. These first Brunswick records used the vertical cut system like Edison Disc Records, and were not sold in large numbers. They were recorded in the United States but sold only in Canada. 1920s In January 1920, a new line of Brunswick Records was introduced in the U.S. and Canada that employed the lateral cut system which was becoming the default cut for 78 discs. Brunswick started its standard popular series at 2000 and ended up in 1940 at 8517. However, when the series reached 4999, they skipped over the previous allocated 5000s and continued at 6000. When t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reproducing Piano
A player piano (also known as a pianola) is a self-playing piano containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism, that operates the piano action via programmed music recorded on perforated paper or metallic rolls, with more modern implementations using MIDI. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sales peaked in 1924, then declined, as the improvement in phonograph recordings due to electrical recording methods developed in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home music reproduction via radio in the same period helped cause their eventual decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production. History In 1896, Edwin S. Votey invented the first practical pneumatic piano player, called the Pianola. This mechanism came into widespread use in the 20th century, and was all-pneumatic, with foot-operated bellows providing a sourc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Los Angeles Art Organ Company
{{More footnotes, date=April 2009 The Los Angeles Art Organ Company was based, as its name suggests, in Los Angeles, California. The firm built instruments of unusually high quality and was the successor to the Murray M. Harris Organ Co., which was reorganized following Harris's ouster from the company for financial shenanigans.Biswanger, Ray. Music in the Marketplace. Bryn Mawr: Friends of the Wanamaker Organ Press, 1999. William Boone Fleming was the factory supervisor. The Los Angeles Art Organ Co. operated only from around 1903 to 1905, at which point it was moved to Hoboken, New Jersey and renamed the Electrolian Organ Company, with major stockholder Eben Smith as its president. Smith died shortly thereafter and the company went out of business. The company was hoping to make major inroads in the lucrative residence-organ market, and had its own roll-playing mechanism that drew crippling patent-infringement lawsuits from the rival Aeolian Company. The greatest accomplishment ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Farrand & Votey Organ Company
Farrand & Votey Organ Company was a nineteenth-century manufacturer of pianos, reed and pipe organs, and player pianos located in Detroit, Michigan. It evolved from William R. Farrand and Edwin S. Votey, hence the name of Farrand & Votey. The company is the development of the old Detroit Reed Organ Company that was originally bought out in 1881. The Farrand & Votey Organ Company produced 7,200 instruments a year by 1889. The company made huge organs on special order contracts. In 1891 the company built a monumental 2,700 pipe organ for the Detroit's First Presbyterian Church. In 1893 it built a huge organ for the Chicago World's Fair, where it was played in recitals by world-renowned organists. In 1897 it built the nation's largest pipe organ. The company dissolved in 1897 and split up into two separate companies of the owners, each making their own style of organs. History The origin of the Farrand & Votey Organ Company dates back to 1881 when the employee owned ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
