Loud Brothers

Established in 1822, it was the leading American piano manufacturer till 1837, when the factory closed due to overproduction, market flooding, and plummeting sales.

In this single year, they claimed to have made 680 instruments, which was a large output for such a comparatively remote period, particularly when the use of pianos was limited almost to the very wealthy classes.

It is finished in the best style, has a fine full tone and a very good touch; it is, moreover, a beautiful piece of furniture and decidedly entitles the makers to the silver medal, being the best of the four upright pianos exhibited."

This individual was a driver of a Broadway stage in New York City ten years before, who, owing to the death of a Southern relative, found himself suddenly lifted into the arms of “Queen Money."

This had some meaning, principally because he found these supporters of the American Constitution too proud to acknowledge him as an equal on account of his former occupation.

He accordingly erected a magnificent residence, furnished it in the most elaborate way imaginable, filled his stables with the best-blooded horses in the country, and carried his schemes to the most eccentric point.

The most peculiar feature of Gordon's actions was that he engaged an excellent orchestra to play specially for the amusement of himself and his visitors, who were mostly persons from the North.

He went to Loud Brothers in Philadelphia, and paid them an extraordinary price to make him the most elaborate and remarkable pianoforte ever made in the United States up to that year.

The Louds in their effort to be extraordinary, therefore, in accordance with the price agreed upon, produced an instrument having a compass of seven and one-half octaves,[6] the most extensive range ever reached before that period ; but it was absolutely worthless from a musical standpoint, so musicians said.

[3] In 1835, he took out a patent for a cast metal plate, with compensating tubes, after the manner of Thoms & Allen's plate for grands, patented previously in London, with the difference that Loud's tubes were supposed to rest in sockets cast in the frame, which was produced in two entire castings, unlike Babcock's plate, This frame, however, was only a mere strip of cast-iron adjusted with small screws in the woodwork, outside the hitch-pin section, and this was a copy of Babcock's scheme.

[3] Various arrangements of this idea may be met with in old instruments of the period, in which tubes are applied in different ways, but invariably always so as to permit the strings to rest on a wooden back-bridge, because there was a general distrust of metal manifested.

This became the accepted system of bracing after 1840 in most manufacturing centres, until the more general adoption of the whole metal plate in recent years.

Thomas C. Loud, assisted by his father, during the intervening years retrieved the status of the name in connection with pianos, and up to about 1848 did a very large business.