Frederick Mathushek

Frederick Mathushek (June 9, 1814 – November 9, 1891) was a piano maker who worked in Worms, Germany, and in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, during the second half of the nineteenth century.

He apprenticed with a pianomaker until the age of 17, when he travelled to visit piano making facilities in Germany, Austria, Russia, and Paris.

[1] In 1849 Mathushek emigrated to New York and worked for John B. Dunham, who was one of the first piano manufacturers to introduce overstringing in America several years earlier.

[4] Piano historians Daniel Spillane and Dolge wrote that by 1857 Mathushek had been engaged to bring some of Spencer B. Driggs' designs to practical form.

[5] These overstrung pianos had closely spaced strings arranged at sharp angles to the keyboard following the same principles as the bichord parlor grands introduced in America by Chickering and Sons in the early 1850s (now known as cocked hats).

In his 1902 biography, Steinert blamed their lack of success on inexperience in manufacturing and advertisement, as well as "certain difficulties regarding [their] Superintentent"; according to an 1882 account written by Mathushek's grandson, ownership of the company passed to Henry S. Parmelee, who he wrote had been involved from the start but "managed, by certain means...to obtain control of all the stock except that belonging to...Mathushek".

His father Spencer (c. 1805–1875)[14] was a wealthy New Haven businessman[15] who had previously been president of the Driggs Piano Co. in New York[16] and had patented tuning pin bushings—individual tubular wooden plugs pressed into a sockets in the cast frame to hold the tuning pins instead of a single structural wooden wrest plank bolted to the frame—and iron frame squares almost entirely lacking wood structural components in 1862 and 1865.

According to the account in the 1882 Music and Drama article, by 1870 Mathushek returned to New York and was only nominally associated with the Mathushek Piano Manufacturing Company; Dolge dated it one year later when he was listed there in unassigned patents he received for a system compensating wires arranged to counteract the bending strain of the main strings, and vertically bent key levers for upright pianos.

The bridge arrangement, styled the equilibre system, involved deflecting the strings alternately toward and away from the soundboard to two different levels of hitchpins—a difference claimed to be as much as 15 degrees in one advertisement—in order to minimize the downward strain applied to the sounding board (which is usually less than 2 degrees with conventional pinned bridges).