(b Huy, 6 Sept 1735; d Paddington, London, 4 May 1803). English instrument maker and inventor of Flemish birth. The third child of Maximilien Joseph Merlin and Marie-Anne Levasseur, Merlin first became noted for his mechanical ability during the six years he spent in Paris from about 1754 until 1760, when he came to England in the suite of the Spanish ambassador, the conde de Fuentes. By 1763, after a brief spell working for a London goldsmith called Sutton, he took a position as ‘first or principal mechanic’ at Cox's Museum in Spring Gardens. While he was there he became conversant with the range of automata which filled the museum, an experience which was to influence him in setting up on his own. This he did in 1773, nominally as a maker of mathematical instruments, although in fact this was but one aspect of his considerable inventive ingenuity. Illustrated in the catalogue of an exhibition devoted to Merlin, held at Kenwood House, London, in 1985, are examples of his work as a watch and clockmaker, his development of several forms of the wheel-chair, the roller-skate, the Dutch oven (for which he took out a patent in 1773), weighing-machines and many of the ingenious automata which he exhibited at his Mechanical Museum in London.
Merlin also made ‘improvements’ to the cello and the violin, but his most important instrumental development was a downstriking piano action which he patented in 1774. This could be used in instruments designed specifically as combinations of harpsichord and piano, such as the magnificent compound instrument of 1780 (also fitted with a rudimentary clockwork recording mechanism) in the Deutsches Museum, Munich, or it could be fitted to existing harpsichords (an example of a 1758 Kirkman harpsichord so adapted survives at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), or, finally, it could be used solely in pianos (a splendid example of a Merlin grand piano – with four strings per note – survives at Ampthill House, Buckinghamshire). Merlin also produced upright and square pianos, and at least one square survives in combination with a chamber organ (an ‘organised piano’). At the request of his friend, Dr Charles Burney, Merlin extended the compass of the piano upwards and downwards to give a full six octaves. Merlin was popular with London society, having a ready wit and an engaging character. A portrait of him by Gainsborough is at Kenwood House.
BoalchM
R.E.M. Harding: The Piano-Forte: its History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Cambridge, 1933/R, 2/1978/R)
P.A. Scholes: The Great Doctor Burney, ii (Oxford, 1948)
R. Russell: The Harpsichord and Clavichord (London, 1959, 2/1973 by H. Schott)
F. Hubbard: Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making (Cambridge, MA, 1965, 2/1967)
H. Schott: ‘From Harpsichord to Piano: a Chronology and Commentary’, EMc, xiii (1985), 28–38
CHARLES MOULD