Julius Ferdinand Blüthner (11 March 1824 - 13 April 1910) was a German

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 musica ...

maker and founder of the

Blüthner Julius Blüthner Pianofortefabrik GmbH, is a piano-manufacturing company in Leipzig, Germany.

piano factory.

Biography

Blüthner was born in Falkenhain (now

Meuselwitz Meuselwitz () is a town in the Altenburger Land district, in Thuringia, Germany. It is situated 12 km northwest of Altenburg and 11 km east of Zeitz. History During World War II, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp operated ...

Thuringia Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million. Erfurt is the capital and lar ...

. In 1853 he founded a

-manufacturing company in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

Germany. Blüthner pianos had an early success at exhibitions, conservatories and the concert stage. Further inventions and innovations lead Blüthner to patent a ''repetition action'', and, in 1873, the aliquot scaling patent for grand pianos. This added a fourth, sympathetic (''aliquot'') string to each trichord group in the treble to enrich the piano's weakest register by enhancing the

overtone An overtone is any resonant frequency above the fundamental frequency of a sound. (An overtone may or may not be a harmonic) In other words, overtones are all pitches higher than the lowest pitch within an individual sound; the fundamental i ...

spectrum of the ins