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The Music Trade Review
36
DECEMBER 18, 1926
The Technical and Supply Department—(Continued from page 35)
all this is going to mean for the future of the
piano trade.
Quality, Price and Output
Tt is, of course, perfectly obvious that if the
prices of the wood we need for making pianos
continue to increase, we shall be obliged con-
tinuously to ask more for our pianos. I am not
one of those who have cried that piano prices
are too high and that if they were, say, 25
per cent lower all round a great many more
pianos would be bought. On the contrary, I am
perfectly sure that price has far less to do with
the question of output than has salesmanship.
There is plenty of purchasing power in the
country to care for all the pianos that the
present industry could put out even if it worked
overtime two hours a day for three hundred
days per year. The trouble is with our mer-
chandising methods, or, rather, this has been
the main trouble up till now. From now on-
ward, however, it is quite certain that the ques-
tion of cost of construction, supposing that the
present rate of increase in prices of raw mate-
rials is maintained, will become more and more
important.
Nor is this all. There is also the question of
quality. Even if we suppose that the lumber
manufacturers are right in telling us that the
alarm sounded in various quarters, as by the
United States Forestry Service, over the coming
exhaustion of our national timber stand is con-
siderably exaggefated, we must allow that
there is still plenty to cause us concern. For
when a supply begins to taper off as to quan-
tity, it is likely to taper off more rapidly as to
quality. The first will proceed in arithmetical,
but the second in geometrical, proportion.
In other words, it is certain that if the present
rate of cutting be maintained, the quality of the
timber cut five years from now will be distinctly
lower than the quality now prevailing. And
precisely that is what we of the piano indus-
try can least afford to have come to us. Then,
without a doubt, though assuredly not until
then, we shall have seriously to consider the
question of substitutes. Nor will this be our
fault.
On the other hand, if and when that fateful
day comes (and we cannot conceal from our-
selves our own apprehension of its steady ap-
proach), we shall not feel parlicularly inclined
to listen patiently to those who tell us that we
are insidious propagandists, working for the
benefit of industries hostile to the industry of
lumber manufacture.
Substitutes?
For, after all, we are in pretty bad shape when
it comes to making practical use of substitutes
for our woods. The Wurlitzer house has de-
veloped recently a practical construction whicli
does away with the wooden wrest plank, and if
other manufacturers work along parallel lines,
they too will doubtless be able to accomplish
similar improvements. So far as I have been
able to see, the Wurlitzer Uni-plate construction
is practical and permanent. If it, or some modi-
fication of it, were generally adopted by the
trade, through some arrangement with the pres-
ent owners of the patents, then, of course, one
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problem would be out of the way, for we could
use something in place of maple for almost any-
thing on the piano save the wrest plank. But
even so, we are only dealing with a very
dubious proposition, since there is, at present,
no active general trade interest in this question
of substitutes for the wooden wrest plank.
Again consider the case of spruce for sound-
boards. Good spruce is the only wood so far
found which gives the piano manufacturer the
required combination of resonating and support-
ing qualities which he needs for the office of
transmitting the vibrations of the strings to
large bodies of circumambient air. All sorts of
other woods have been tried, but no other
species has given the required result. Steel has
been tried, so has aluminum, even parchment
stretched like the head of a drum. Each has
been found to possess certain definite qualities,
to a greater or lesser extent useful and valu-
able; but no one has survived. When we con-
sider the real technical difficulties surrounding
tlie preparation of soundboards, their bridging,
ribbing, crowning and fitting, it is surely evi-
dent that piano manufacturers would long since
have taken to a more convenient substitute, if
such an article had ever been discovered.
Now supposing that the supply of suitable
spruce (and that does not mean every kind of
the species) were becoming low and that no
hopes could be held out of any considerable
addition of trees "of adequate sizes for at least
twenty years to come. What then should we of
the piano trade be obliged to do? Plainly we
should be obliged to go abroad to the forests
of Germany, of Russia and of Roumania, and
pay the price demanded by the owners of the
timber we needed, plus the duty imposed for
the benefit of an industry at home no longer
able to supply us. The thought is not pleasant,
yet one finds it hard to see what will be the
alternative within a few years, unless indeed
there exist in the United States new and
secret supplies of which so far we have heard
nothing.
Already soundboard spruce is actually being
imported, nor need it be supposed that any
house would do anything like this save
through sheer necessity. And what is true to-
day of soundboard spruce will to-morrow be
true of maple or of pine.
For this reason, then, the whole piano indus-
try is likely to feel, I think, grateful to the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers for
sponsoring a research into the question of pos-
sible substitutes for the native woods, espe-
cially the hardwoods, which are now causing
anxiety to large users, including the furniture
and piano industries. It is quite probable that
in course of time the requirements of the re-
search will be sufficiently arduous to impel an
appeal to the industries likely to be benefited by
it. Some words as to its scope and aims arc
therefore in order.
At the Chicago meeting of the A. S. M. E.
mentioned above, the task of thus explaining
the facts was undertaken by Major George P.
Ahern (U. S. Army, retired), of the Tropical
Plant Research Foundation, Washington, D. C,
and late Chief Forester of the Philippines, who
is in charge of the preliminary investigations.
As he informed that meeting, the research is
intended to obtain facts relating to some defi-
nite tract of timber-bearing land in Central or
South America or in the Philippine Islands, a
tract sufficiently large to contain an adequate
number of trees of every species. It is pro-
posed to choose such a tract, of, say, half a mil-
lion acres, and to carry out in it a complete sur-
vey of all the timber it contains, classifying the
latter by species and then analyzing these in
respect of their physical properties. After the
physical analysis, it is proposed to investigate
the economic side of the situation, to discover
to what extent it would be possible for Ameri-
can lumbermen to go into the tract. Take out
the trees and deliver the logs at American ports,
at prices within the reach of the industries
which could make use of them.
In other words, the aim of the research is to
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