I will now proceed to recount briefly the history of the pianoforte from
the earliest mention of that name, continuing it to our contemporary
instruments, as far as they can be said to have entered into the
historical domain. It has been my privilege to assist in proving that
Bartolommeo Cristofori was, in the first years of the 18th century,
the real inventor of the pianoforte, but with a wide knowledge and
experience of how long it has taken to make any invention in keyed
instruments practicable and successful, I cannot believe that Cristofori
was the first to attempt to contrive one. I should rather accept his
good and complete instrument as the sum of his own lifelong studies and
experiments, added to those of generations before him, which have left
no record for us as yet discovered.

The earliest mention of the name pianoforte (_piano e forte_), applied
to a musical instrument, has been recently discovered by Count Valdrighi
in documents preserved in the Estense Library, at Modena. It is dated
A.D. 1598, and the reference is evidently to an instrument of the spinet
or cembalo kind; but how the tone was produced there is no statement,
no word to base an inference upon. The name has not been met with
again between the Estense document and Scipione Maffei's well-known
description, written in 1711, of Cristofori's "gravecembalo col piano e
forte." My view of Cristofori's invention allows me to think that the
Estense "piano e forte" may have been a hammer cembalo, a very imperfect
one, of course. But I admit that the opposite view of forte and piano,
contrived by registers of spinet-jacks, is equally tenable.

Bartolommeo Cristofori was a Paduan harpsichord maker, who was invited
by Prince Ferdinand dei Medici to Florence, to take charge of the large
collection of musical instruments the Prince possessed. At Florence he