Mason & Hamlin

Mason & Hamlin is a piano manufacturer based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. They also manufactured a large number of pump organs during the 19th century.

Mason & Hamlin was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1854 by Henry Mason, son of Lowell Mason, the American hymn composer and musical educator, and Emmons Hamlin, a mechanic and inventor who had worked for melodeon makers Prince & Co. in Buffalo, New York.

They originally manufactured only melodeons, but in 1855 introduced the organ-harmonium or flat-topped cabinet organ. This design placed the bellows vertically and underneath the reeds, and served as the model for the suction operated American-style reed organ. By the early 1870s they were considered the largest and most important manufacturer of reed organs, employing about 500 and producing as many as 200 instruments a week. Mason & Hamlin supplied organs to several prominent composers, notably Franz Liszt, whose name the company applied to their patented selective sustain mechanism for organs comparable to the sostenuto in pianos.

Mason & Hamlin began manufacturing pianos in 1883. Initially they built only upright pianos featuring a patented method of tuning and maintaining string tension which they marketed as the screw stringer and intended as an improvement over the traditional system with tuning pins. In 1895, the piano department was completely reorganized by Richard W. Gertz, an independent piano designer from Germany who had created new scales for them earlier that year. Gertz was elected secretary of the company in 1903, and president in 1906, and had patented the company's Tension Resonator, a device fastened to the perimeter of the wooden structure of pianos meant to prevent their sounding boards from flattening. This was first included in their grands in 1900. The firm advertises that it is currently used in all Mason & Hamlin pianos.

By the turn of the 20th century, the Golden Age of the Piano was in full force and the most illustrious concert artists of the day aligned themselves with piano manufacturers including Sergei Rachmaninoff whose 1924 recording of his Second Piano Concerto was made using a Mason & Hamlin. Composer Maurice Ravel said of Mason & Hamlin pianos, "While preserving all the qualities of the percussion instrument, the Mason & Hamlin pianoforte also serves magnificently the composer's concept by its extensive range in dynamics, as well as quality of tone. It is not short of being a small orchestra. In my opinion, the Mason & Hamlin is a real work of art."

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