Stacy Grout, age 10, of Macon, Mo., for her question:
WHO INVENTED THE PLAYER PIANO?
A piano can produce both harmony and melody at the same time. It makes use of scientific principles, such as those governing the vibration of stretched metal strings and those involving the behavior of sound. But more than this, a piano can also express human emotions. Loud or soft, fast or slow, the piano delivers beautiful and satisfying tone¬color effects.
No one knows who the first person was who discovered the musical beauty of the stretched string. The piano was the result of a gradual evolution. Ancient man developed the lyre and the harp, in which strings were plucked with the fingers. Then in the Middle East the dulcimer evolved, in which strings were struck with mallets.
Next came the clavichord, which has a keyboard to control the mallets, and then the harpsichord where quills plucked the strings.
An Italian named Bartolommeo Cristofori in 1709 worked out the principle of striking a hammer against strings to make a keyboard instrument that could be played loudly or softly by the touch of the fingers. He called his instrument gravicembalo col piano a forte.
It took almost 200 more years for the player piano to come along, but when it arrived in the late 1800s, it flourished until the late 1920s.
While working on automatic devices to play music at home, inventors came up with the player piano idea. The first ones were actually mechanical piano players. They were encased in cabinets that could be pushed up at any piano. Wooden ''fingers'' extended over the keys. Seated in front of the cabinet, the operator pumped foot pedals to make the pneumatic mechanism work.
In the first player pianos, a moving roll of paper, cut with patterns of holes, directed air pressure to the ''fingers,'' making them play upon the keys. Foot pumping, pneumatics and air pressure were common to all mechanical players.
The next step in the evolution of the player piano was putting the mechanical parts inside the case of the piano.
Reproducing player pianos provided the expression automatically, copying exactly the playing of the person who made the roll. Many great pianists made reproducing player rolls before the phonograph came along. Some of the early great performances have since been transferred to phonograph records by means of these rolls.
Today the player piano is a novelty item. Many have been improved to run by electricity rather than foot pedals, and there are a number of companies still producing piano rolls. The player piano has, unfortunately, been replaced by the phonograph.
Attempts to improve the conventional piano with electronic devices have not been successful. Many electronic instruments have been produced, but none is as good as the conventional piano.