Frederick Mathushek

Frederick Mathushek (June 9, 1814 - November 9, 1891), was a piano maker working in Worms, in Rhineland, Germany and in the United States at New York City and New Haven, Connecticut during the second half of the nineteenth century. His name continued to be used by several different piano manufacturers through the 1950s, and was filed independently as a trademark for musical instruments in 2005 and 2008.

Frederick Mathushek was born in Mannheim, in Baden, June 9, 1814, and apprenticed with a pianomaker of that city until the age of 17, when he travelled visiting piano making facilities in Germany, Austria, Russia, and eventually Paris, before establishing his own workshop in Worms, where he built pianos influenced by those he had seen in the factory of Jean-Henri Pape.

In 1849 Mathushek emigrated to New York (after holding a prominent position with Erard in London according to his obituary), and worked for John B. Dunham, who was one of the first piano manufacturers to introduce overstringing in America several years earlier. Alfred Dolge wrote Mathushek perfected a simplified press for applying felt covering to piano hammers in 1850, and in 1851 he patented a method for overstringing in cast iron frame square pianos to allow a greater number of strings with larger diameters. The arrangement was intended to improve tone and stability, and it became known as the sweep scale because it distributed the strings much farther apart on the sounding board than more conventional methods of stringing.

Mathushek started his own workshop in New York in 1852, and that year listed his address at 118 East 21st street, but piano historians Daniel Spillane and Alfred Dolge wrote that by 1857 he had been engaged to bring some of Spencer B. Driggs' designs to practical form. Driggs had moved to New York from Detroit, Michigan in 1856 after patenting his linguine repeating attachment, and campaigned to improve the piano through a series of patents he concentrated around the construction of violins. The identifying feature was the use of two un-barred sounding boards, one of which was meant to form the bottom of the instrument instead of the usual heavy wooden base or frame, and they were intended to be bent into arches to increase their stiffness and coupled using a sound post.

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