Friedrich Blühmel (born 1777, died before 1845) was a German horn player and musical instrument builder. He is credited as one of the earliest inventors of

brass instrument valves Brass instrument valves are valves used to change the length of tubing of a brass instrument allowing the player to reach the notes of various harmonic series. Each valve pressed diverts the air stream through additional tubing, individually or i ...

Biography

Friedrich Blühmel initially worked as a coal miner, whilst also learning to play the violin and various woodwind instruments. In 1808 he started playing trumpet and horn and began calling himself a ''Berghautboist'', an old German term for a mine musician, playing in a band in Waldenburg, Silesia. Around 1813, Blühmel designed a valve system for

brass instruments A brass instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound by sympathetic vibration of air in a tubular resonator in sympathy with the vibration of the player's lips. Brass instruments are also called labrosones or labrophones, from Latin ...

, apparently independently of his fellow horn player

Heinrich Stölzel Heinrich David Stölzel (7 September 1777 – 16 February 1844) was a German horn player who developed some of the first valves for brass instruments. He developed the first valve for a brass musical instrument, the Stölzel valve, in 1818, a ...

who created a similar system at around the same time. Both inventors added two valves to the

natural horn The natural horn is a musical instrument that is the predecessor to the modern-day (French) horn (differentiated by its lack of valves). Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century the natural horn evolved as a separation from the trump ...

, allowing the instrument to play a full chromatic series. This allowed the horn to develop into a more useful melodic instrument, eventually becoming the instrument known today as the

French horn The French horn (since the 1930s known simply as the horn in professional music circles) is a brass instrument made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a flared bell. The double horn in F/B (technically a variety of German horn) is the horn most ...

.Why Valves Were Invented
/ref> In 1818, Friedrich Blühmel and Heinrich Stölzel registered a patent for their two-valve chromatic horn. This was expanded in 1819 to a three-valve system by the instrument builder

Christian Friedrich Sattler Christian Friedrich Sattler (1778–1842) was a brass instrument maker and inventor in Leipzig, Germany. In 1821 Sattler became renowned for two inventions: the chromatic valve trumpet which applied three valves to the natural trumpet to provide ...

in Leipzig. The first trumpets with this valve system were built in 1820, with almost all brass instruments eventually including such systems during the following decades.

References

German male musicians 19th-century German inventors Horn players German musical instrument makers 1777 births 19th-century deaths Year of death uncertain {{Germany-musician-stub