Louis Lot

Louis Esprit Lot (born May 17, 1807 in La Couture , Département Eure , † January 12, 1896 in Chatou ) was a well-known French flute maker .

Louis Lot learned to make flutes and in 1827 came to Clair Godfroy's workshop in Paris. In 1833 he became Godfroy's son-in-law and in 1836 a partner in the company. Together with Clair Godfroy's son Vincent Hypolite Godfroy , Lot constructed the first French flute model based on the model of Theobald Böhm's ring flute, and in 1847 the company received the official license to build flutes based on the Böhm model in France.

In 1855, Louis Lot founded his own workshop in Paris (from which Theobald Böhm was later to obtain parts himself, for example fully drilled wooden pipes, as he could not cope with the number of orders he received). After Louis Dorus had succeeded Jean-Louis Tulou (an opponent of the Böhm flute) as professor of flute at the Conservatoire de Paris in 1860 , the Conservatoire became a regular customer of Louis Lot. The winners of the annual competition (first in this series was Paul Taffanel ) have since regularly received a plumb flute. At the Paris World Exhibition in 1867 , Lot presented a new flute model with thicker walls, larger tone holes and mouth, and a more stable mechanism with a modified G sharp key; this shape is known to this day as the “French model” of the flute. Louis Lot's only gold flute was made in 1869 for the flautist Jean Rémusat (in 1948 it passed into the possession of Jean-Pierre Rampal ). In 1875 Lot, who had made around 2,150 flutes (870 of which made of metal) and piccolos, retired.

Web links

• Information from the German Flute Society
• Information at flutehistory.com (engl.)
• Jean-Pierre Rampal plays the golden plumb flute from 1869