Winter and Company was an American manufacturer of

piano The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keybo ...

s. Founded in 1901 as Heller & Co. by cabinetmaker Gottlieb Heller (b. 1868 in Stuttgart), the firm was purchased and renamed in June 1901 by Julius Winter (b. 1856 in Hungary). In 1903, the company opened a factory on Southern Boulevard in

The Bronx The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New Y ...

borough of

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

. In 1904, the company began to sell

player 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 im ...

s that used a "Master Player" mechanism of its own design. Founded in the last decades of the

Golden Age of the Piano The Golden Age of the Piano refers to a "golden age" extending variously from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century during which composing and performance on the piano achieved notable heights; or to the decades between roughly 1890 ...

, when the instrument had no competition from radio, recorded music, and the automobile, Winter & Co. outlived the vast majority of its contemporary pianomakers, and acquired several of them that fell on hard times. Among these were Chicago-based The Cable Company in 1943, once the country's largest maker of reed organs; the Ivers and Pond Piano Company of

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

, in 1945; Kranich and Bach in 1946; and Hardman Peck in 1953. Mason & Risch of Ontario, Canada, was another. Its longtime president was William G. Heller, a son of Gottlieb. In 1951, the company opened a factory in Memphis, Tennessee. In the 1960s, Winter & Co. was merged with Aeolian-American pianomaking firm, becoming the

Aeolian 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 surp ...

References

Piano manufacturing companies of the United States {{Musical-instrument-company-stub