Google has created one of its trademark doodles to celebrate what would have been the 360th birthday of Bartolomeo Cristofori, who was credited with inventing the piano.
Cristofori was born in 1655 in in Padua in the Republic of Venice. At the age of 33 he was employed by Prince Ferdinando de Medici, son of the duke of Tuscany. He hired Cristofori to not only be a musical instrument technician, but also possibly as a musical instrument inventor.
Before he invented the piano Cristofori invented two other keyboards, the spinettone, a kind of harpsichord, and the more original oval spinet, invented in 1690.
It is thought that he began work on the first piano in 1698, but the first documented record of it came in 1700. What made it so incredible was his creation of a hammer mechanism that hit keyboard strings to create sound.
Depending upon how hard the player hit the keys on the keyboard, the hammer mechanism would hit the strings accordingly and the player was able to create softer or louder sounds.
The Google Doodle celebrates this mechanism with its animation which shows the action within a piano and the user can turn the volume up or down to see how the mechanism enhanced or dampened the sound.
No one is sure how many pianos Cristofori built, but today only three survive that were made by him him personally. They were all built in the 1720s and are found in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,