Carl Friedrich Zimmermann

Carl Friedrich Zimmermann (* August 4th / 5th (?) 1817 in Morgenröthe ; † October 20, 1898 in Philadelphia ) was a German instrument maker.

In the 1830s in Carlsfeld in the Ore Mountains , he began to build bellows instruments in general and from 1847 harmonicas , which he had met at CF Uhlig. This was a hand-pulled instrument with a range of up to 102 tones (Scheffler's pitch). He called his instruments the concertina . Zimmermann was probably the first to apply this English term, which goes back to Charles Wheatstone (1802–1872), to this special German type of harmonica.

In terms of music history, there is no longer any doubt that the improved concertina fingering system , which later became known as the bandoneon , goes back not to Zimmermann, but to the Krefeld music teacher Heinrich Band .

Zimmermann sold his factory in 1864 and emigrated to the USA, where he was still active as an instrument maker. In 1882 he had a musical instrument patented there under the name Charles F. Zimmermann , which, in contrast to the instrument known today as the autoharp, was a kind of double zither in the shape of a butterfly, in which the strings on each of the two instrument sides were given a different tuning. The autoharps in use today probably go back to a development by the German Karl August Gütter from Markneukirchen. After Zimmermann got to know the instrument on a visit to Germany, he applied for a patent on Gütter's design in the USA, named it Autoharp and began selling the instrument, which soon became a sales success.

literature

• Becky Blackley: The autoharp book , Iad Pub 1983, p.17

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Memorial plaque on CF Zimmermann's parents' house (Schönfelder bakery building in Carlsfeld) and memorial on Carlsfelder Hauptstrasse