William Dowd

He and his friend Frank Hubbard built a clavichord when they were both graduate students; this led to their both deciding to abandon their intended careers as teachers of English and instead to become harpsichord builders, basing their methods on historical principles.

Their joint business came to an end in 1958, and Dowd established a workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts along historical lines, producing around twenty instruments a year until 1988.

Dowd's instruments have long provided the benchmark for reliability in terms of tuning and general stability, cleanliness of construction, and for the influence that they have had on succeeding generations of builders.

[citation needed] He was the first builder to seriously consider the eighteenth-century German instruments of Michael Mietke (in contrast to his colleague Hubbard).

His instruments were used in performance and recording by such artists as Gustav Leonhardt, Isolde Ahlgrimm, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Igor Kipnis, Bob van Asperen, and many others.