The science of making music
Swiss engineer Louis Lachenal was manager at Wheatstone’s workshops before founding Lachenal & Co, which became one of the most prolific London-based makers. This 22-key Peerless instrument, above left, with pierced rosewood end plates and hexagonal body sold for £750 necessary to make it work, he instead used copper pennies to achieve the same effect.
Interestingly, he turned again to music in order to experiment with sound, unveiling what he called an Aconcryptophone to an unsuspecting audience. This centred on a soundbox suspended from the ceiling from which came the notes played on a piano, harp and dulcimer concealed in another room.
The sound travelled from them along a steel rod to the soundbox, giving the impression that the magical “instrument” hanging above the audience’s heads was actually responsible for producing the music.
In other experiments with sound, Wheatstone is said to have been the first person to use the words telephone and microphone. He was also involved in the development of the telegraph and in 1840, by which time his installations were already allowing railway stations to communicate with each other, he proposed
a submarine telegraph between Dover and Calais. In the same year he was awarded the Royal Medal for work on binocular vision, which led him to invent the stereoscope, a hand-held viewer much loved by the Victorian. This made two apparently identical views appear three-dimensional when seen through right eye/left eye lenses and examples are still collected today.
His Pseudoscope; Chronoscope; Photometer; Laleidophone; cryptology and the use of cyphers; his Polar clock and a device for measuring electrical resistance, still known today as “Wheatstone’s Charles Jeffries was an itinerant brushmaker and musician who turned his hand to repairing and then making concertinas, but little more is known about him. This fine 39-key instrument sold for £4,300 Bridge”, are all way beyond my capability to explain here.
Wheatstone’s concertina was patented in 1829. His instrumentmaking uncle had died in 1823, and although dismissive of the commercial side of the business, Wheatstone took it over to continue his experiments with sound, leaving his elder brother William to run it.
By then German makers had devised a wind instrument called a Mundharmonika, but Wheatstone transformed it into a six-sided “squeezebox” with 64 keys and simple chromatic fingering divided between the player’s two hands. Unlike a harmonica, each key sounds the same note regardless of whether the bellows are pushed or pulled.
Concertinas became popular both in the parlour and the music halls as well as with temperance bands and the Salvation Army.
Wheatstone also won a medal at the 1851 Great Exhibition for a type of portable harmonium. He died from inflammation of the lungs after catching a cold in Paris while working on his submarine cables. Famed book and album cover artist George Underwood (b 1947) has painted a Kala brand concert ukulele in oils, entitled “You Can Ukulele Tattoo”