Simply Music’s timeline of key developments in the piano’s long history.

Ludwig van Beethoven writes Für Elise, believed to be the best-selling work of sheet music in history. It was probably composed on an Erard fortepiano, but we can’t be sure because the passionateplayer (the greatest performer of his day) was notorious for breaking his instruments!

1810

The first upright piano is developed by Robert Wornum in London. This space-saving and affordable design found ahuge market in fashionable living rooms.

1826

The player piano or pianola grows tobecome a staple in middle-class homes.The ability to buy piano-rolls of popular songs and have them play automatically at thepump of a pedal made them hugely popular, but advancements in radio and 78rpm records in the 1920s began a new trend in music listening that quickly replaced them.

1900

Pianist and composer Nils Frahm keepsthe flame burning for the greatest musical instrument by launching Piano Day on March 29, the 88th day of the year, in part as a way of promoting the work of David Klavins and his innovative and often gargantuan pianos.

2015

The clavichord was a kind of mechanical hammered dulcimer, operated via a keyboard first developed for pipe organs. It had a very limited sound and range, but was popular in homes, including Bach’s.

1400 AD

Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua inventsa new hammer mechanism which offers players a much greater dynamic range and sustain. It is dubbed “gravicembalo col piano e forte”—harpsichord with soft and loud, eventually shortened to piano-forte. Cristofori’s groundbreaking design is the grandfather of every piano since.

1700The harpsichord was a more sophisticated instrument, but its mechanism that plucked the strings rather than striking them still gave it limited expressive potential.

1500

English inventor John Broadwood begins to develop bigger, more powerful instruments, eventually introducing the sustain pedal and extending their range.

1770

The first iron frame is developed, allowing for much higher tension strings. Modern piano frames can have as much as 20 tons of total string tension. This advancement industrialized the manufacturing ofthe piano.

1825

The Steinway piano company is founded, and quickly grew to be one of the most famous makers, and the standard for concert halls worldwide.

1853

The invention of the Storytone electric piano begins the next revolution, advanced by the classic Fender Rhodesin the 1960s, electronic pianos in the 1970s and digital pianos in the 1980s. These most modern instruments sound and feel uncannily like acoustic pianos, but theyjust aren’t.

1939

The hammered dulcimer was the first widely used stringed musical instrument, popular in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, China, Greece and Rome. It was basicallya box with strings stretched across it and struck with drumstick-like hammers.

500 BC

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