Silex Piano
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Silex Piano
The Silex Piano is a musical instrument of the Lithophone family. It was created by Honoré Baudre, circa 1885 and was described in several contemporary publications. ''Cassell's Magazine'' According to '' Cassell's Family Magazine Illustrated'', 1885: It has long been known that certain flintstones emit a musical note when struck with other flints; and M. Baudre, a French musician, has constructed a piano on this principle. The flints are chosen according to their pitch when struck, and suspended horizontally by their two ends in a row like the keys of a Piano. An elegant metal framework supports the stones, and wires are used to suspend them. A sounding-board is placed a fraction of an inch below the row of stones. Tunes are played by means of two smaller flints held in the hands. The stone which emits the greatest tone weighs 4 lbs.; that which gives the corresponding half-tone weighs 9lbs. This large flint is immediately followed by one weighing 1oz. A 3oz. stone in the set ...
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Lithophone
A lithophone is a musical instrument consisting of a rock or pieces of rock which are struck to produce musical notes. Notes may be sounded in combination (producing harmony) or in succession (melody). It is an idiophone comparable to instruments such as the glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone and marimba. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, lithophones are designated as '111.22' – directly-struck percussion plaques. Notable examples A rudimentary form of lithophone is the "rock gong", usually a natural rock formation opportunistically adapted to produce musical tones, such as that on Mfangano Island, in Lake Victoria, Kenya. The Great Stalacpipe Organ of Luray Caverns, Virginia, USA uses 37 stalactites to produce the Western scale. Other stalactite lithophones are at Tenkasi in South India, and at Ringing Rocks Park in Pennsylvania. An example that is no longer used is at Cave of the Winds, in Colorado Springs. The Txalaparta (or Chalaparta), a tradition ...
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Cassell's Magazine
''Cassell's Magazine'' is a British magazine that was published monthly from 1897 to 1912. It was the successor to ''Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper'', (1853–1867) becoming ''Cassell's Family Magazine'' in 1874, ''Cassell's Magazine'' in 1897, and, after 1912, ''Cassell's Magazine of Fiction''. The magazine was edited by H. G. Bonavia Hunt from 1874 to 1896, Max Pemberton from 1896 to 1905, David Williamson from 1905 to November 1908, Walter Smith from December 1908 to 1912, and Newman Flower from 1912 to 1922. It was acquired by the Amalgamated Press in 1927 and merged with '' Storyteller'' in 1932. In the 1890s, under Pemberton's editorship, the magazine was based on the '' Strand Magazine'', attempting to be a competitor to that periodical. Contributing authors included Wilkie Collins, whose 1870 novel '' Man and Wife'' raised the magazine's circulation to 70,000. Following the success of George Newnes's ''Tit-Bits'', the '' Strand Magazine'' and Alfred Harmsworth's ' ...
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Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. ''Scientific American'' is owned by Springer Nature, which in turn is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. History ''Scientific American'' was founded by inventor and publisher Rufus Porter (painter), Rufus Porter in 1845 as a four-page weekly newspaper. The first issue of the large format newspaper was released August 28, 1845. Throughout its early years, much emphasis was placed on reports of what was going on at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Patent Office. It also reported on a broad range of inventions including perpetual motion machines, an 1860 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now can be found ...
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The Mechanics' Magazine
Joseph Clinton Robertson (c.1787–1852), pseudonym Sholto Percy, was a Scottish patent agent, writer and periodical editor. He was a political radical prominent in the early days of the working-class press in London, and in the debates within the Mechanics Institute movement. Early life He was born about 1787, the son of Rev. Joseph Robertson and Isobel Mathieson of Stewarton, Scotland. Rev. Joseph Robertson was Minister of Leith Wynd Chapel, Edinburgh, Scotland, but banished from Scotland for performing illegal marriages. ''The Mechanics' Magazine'' Robertson founded ''The Mechanics' Magazine'' in 1823, and edited and largely wrote it until the year of his death. It was a low-priced scientific weekly, and the first publication of its kind. To begin with he was in close alliance with Thomas Hodgskin: they had met in Edinburgh. It took advantage of a stamp tax exemption for technical weeklies not dealing in news. Robertson also devised a way of generating cheap content by an ea ...
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Xylophone
The xylophone (; ) is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel (which uses metal bars), the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use. The term ''xylophone'' may be used generally, to include all such instruments such as the marimba, balafon and even the semantron. However, in the orchestra, the term ''xylophone'' refers specifically to a chromatic instrument of somewhat higher pitch range and drier timbre than the marimba, and these two instruments should not be confused. A person who plays the xylophone is known as a ''xylophonist'' or simply a ''xylophone player''. The term is also popularly used to refer to ...
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The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. ''The Times'' and ''The Sunday Times'', which do not share editorial staff, were founded independently and have only had common ownership since 1966. In general, the political position of ''The Times'' is considered to be centre-right. ''The Times'' is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, such as ''The Times of India'', ''The New York Times'', and more recently, digital-first publications such as TheTimesBlog.com (Since 2017). In countries where these other titles are popular, the newspaper is often referred to as , or as , although the newspaper is of nationa ...
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Flint
Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and start fires. It occurs chiefly as nodules and masses in sedimentary rocks, such as chalks and limestones.''The Flints from Portsdown Hill''
Inside the nodule, flint is usually dark grey, black, green, white or brown in colour, and often has a glassy or waxy appearance. A thin layer on the outside of the nodules is usually different in colour, typically white and rough in texture. The nodules can often be found along s and

Musical Stones Of Skiddaw
The Musical Stones of Skiddaw are a number of lithophones built across two centuries around the town of Keswick, northern England, using hornfels, a stone from the nearby Skiddaw mountain, which is said to have a superior tone and longer ring than the more commonly used slate. The first documented lithophone from Keswick was built in 1785 by Peter Crosthwaite, an eccentric inventor who became interested in the musical properties of the local stone. However, this kind of instrument became widely known only decades later, when in 1840 Joseph Richardson, a local stonemason and self-taught musician, built a larger, eight-octave lithophone with which he and his sons toured the UK and Europe giving numerous concerts, including one in London for Queen Victoria. Richardson's lithophone initially featured 61 tuned and shaped hornfels rocks. It was later enhanced with steel bars, Swiss bells and various other percussions, and survives to this day, being on display at the Keswick Museum and A ...
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Struck Idiophones
Struck is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: *Adolf Struck (1877–1911), German author *Hermann Struck (1876–1944), German artist *Karin Struck (1947–2006), German author *Paul Struck (1776-1820), German composer *Peter Struck (politician) (1943–2012), German politician (SPD) *Peter Struck (classicist), professor at the University of Pennsylvania. See also *Strikebreaker A strikebreaker (sometimes called a scab, blackleg, or knobstick) is a person who works despite a strike. Strikebreakers are usually individuals who were not employed by the company before the trade union dispute but hired after or during the st ... * Struck Oil (other) {{surname ...
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Lithophones
A lithophone is a musical instrument consisting of a rock or pieces of rock which are struck to produce musical notes. Notes may be sounded in combination (producing harmony) or in succession (melody). It is an idiophone comparable to instruments such as the glockenspiel, vibraphone, xylophone and marimba. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system, lithophones are designated as '111.22' – directly-struck percussion plaques. Notable examples A rudimentary form of lithophone is the "rock gong", usually a natural rock formation opportunistically adapted to produce musical tones, such as that on Mfangano Island, in Lake Victoria, Kenya. The Great Stalacpipe Organ of Luray Caverns, Virginia, USA uses 37 stalactites to produce the Western scale. Other stalactite lithophones are at Tenkasi in South India, and at Ringing Rocks Park in Pennsylvania. An example that is no longer used is at Cave of the Winds, in Colorado Springs. The Txalaparta (or Chalaparta), a tradition ...
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