Sébastien Érard

While a boy he showed great aptitude for practical geometry and architectural drawing, and in the workshop of his father, who was an upholsterer, he found opportunity for the early exercise of his mechanical ingenuity.

Here his remarkable constructive skill, though it speedily excited the jealousy of his master and procured his dismissal, almost instantly attracted the notice of musicians and musical instrument makers of eminence.

[1] Before he was twenty-five he set up in business for himself, his first workshop being a room in the hotel of the duchesse de Villeroi, who gave him warm encouragement.

[1] He built his first pianoforte in 1777 in his Paris factory, relocating fifteen years later to premises in London's Great Marlborough Street to escape the French Revolution - his increasing fame and several commissions for the likes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette having placed him at risk.

2016), a greatly refined single-action instrument (tuned in E flat) that could be played in eight major and five minor keys thanks to its ingenious fork mechanism which allowed the strings to be shortened by a semitone.

A knee lever moved the action farther than the action-shift pedal, making the hammers strike only one string.

In Trollope's "Barchester Towers", Archdeacon Grantly, in the concluding chapter, gifts an Erard piano to his new son-in-law.