(b nr Taunton, 14 March 1772; d Elizabeth, NJ, 24 June 1854). English engineer, inventor and piano maker. He spent part of his life in the USA and is best known for his invention of the upright piano and the self-propelling pencil. (Matthias Müller invented the upright piano independently in Vienna about the same time.) Previously, upright pianos were either grands or squares turned on end and placed on a stand, but Hawkins’s achievement was to use the space below the keyboard down to the floor. He called his piano a ‘portable grand’ and patented it in 1800 in Philadelphia and London, his father, Isaac Hawkins, acting as his agent in England. The patent contains a wide range of additional inventions including the addition of metal bracing to support the wooden structure, and mechanical wrest pins that worked in a metal-covered wrest plank (see Pianoforte, §I, 6). This was the first use of metal to stabilize the frame in any piano, and the compensation frame was later developed further by a number of makers, notably the Stodart firm. Hawkins also used an outer covering of cloth on top of layers of leather on the hammers. Two of Hawkins’s surviving pianos (in the Marlowe A. Sigal Collection, Newton Center, Massachusetts, and in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC) are fine examples of cabinet work, both incorporating a keyboard that folds up and handles on either side for easy transport. Hawkins advertised that his pianos could be purchased ‘at little more than half the price of imported grand or square pianofortes’, but his instruments were never popular: in April 1802 Thomas Jefferson complained that his piano would not stay in tune. The 1885 International Inventions Exhibition catalogue states that Hawkins brought his upright piano to London, and that daily performances were given on it but with no success: ‘the ingenuity and even genius displayed in its invention being unsupported by that first desideratum of a Pianoforte, good tone’.
Hawkins also invented the ‘claviole’ (see Claviola (i)), a bowed keyboard instrument in the shape of an upright piano. It was shown in London in 1813–14, whereupon Hawkins abandoned his pursuit of its manufacture owing to the expiration of his patent. Hawkins returned to the USA in 1848.
Rees’s Cyclopaedia, iii (London, 1820), pl.xiv
R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933/R, 2/1978/R)
J.I. Hawkins: The History and Resuscitation of the Claviole, or Finger-Keyed Viol (London, 1845)
H.R. Hollis: The Piano: a Pictorial Account of its Ancestry and Development (Newton Abbot and New York, 1975, 2/1984)
W.E. Mann: Piano Making in Philadelphia before 1825 (diss., U. of Iowa, 1977)
A.W.J.G. Ord-Hume: ‘Hawkins’ Claviole or Finger-Keyed Viol’, Music & Automata, no.11 (1988), 139–41
M. Cole: The Pianoforte in the Classical Era (Oxford, 1998)
M.D. Friesen: ‘Mentor-General to Mankind’: the Life and Work of John Isaac Hawkins in America (thesis, Northern Illinois U.) [forthcoming]
MARGARET CRANMER/MICHAEL D. FRIESEN