«Geni invisibili», the podcast that reveals the (hidden) talent of our inventors – Corriere.it

Who invented the piano? The name already contains the first clue, because only the order of the words has changed since the eighteenth century: it was called fortepiano and even in the English dictionary it narrowed down slightly, becoming the plan. If for some time yellow has had its sequel, for at least two centuries it is certain that the prince of instruments, capable of subduing an entire orchestra, is an Italian invention.

It was Bartolomeo Cristofori, born in Padua on 4 May 1655, harpsichord maker also at the court of Ferdinando de’ Medici, to invent a newly invented Harpicymbalo, which plays piano and forte as stated in the Medici archives of the early eighteenth century. Moreover, already in 1711 the historian Scipione Maffei recognized the Paduan’s fame, crushing any attempt to usurp the great invention from the peninsula, read the Germans. Johann Gottfried Silbermann added pedals to Cristofori’s invention. But clearly the German Johann Heinrich Zedler in his universal lexicon he thought well of expanding the benefits brought about by this also important innovation, citing the fellow countryman as the father of the piano.

On the other hand, at least four prototypes by Cristofori have come down to our days: one of them, a fortepiano from 1722, is found in the Museum of musical instruments in Rome and we know that it belonged to Benedetto and then to Alessandro Marcello.

Now what is it that unites at a distance the history of the piano, with that, for example, of the discovery of the void, of biotechnology, of the microprocessor or even of the pencil? They are innovations, inventions, scientific discoveries that have changed our lives but whose history too often we do not know because we suffer from a sort of chronic forgetfulness, a kind of Eustachian syndrome that makes us deaf to our own greatness in the scientific field and technological.

Here’s why in the podcast Invisible Genes (available here) these chapters are bound again in a single book by hearing, where possible, also the protagonists. Because it is not true that we left the sign of our creativity only in the past: gene therapies were born in Milan in 1992 with Claudio Bordignon. Just as it is now established that the first monolithic Intel microprocessor was designed by a team led by Federico Faggin from Vicenza.

Its authorship is also confirmed by that typically Italian habit of signing the creations: an FF can be seen on the first microprocessor, as well as on Benedetto Marcello’s fortepiano that maestro Alessandro Quarta will tell us about can be read: Bartholomaeus De Christophoris Patavinus inventor faciebat.