Other important technical innovations of this era included changes to the groove the piano was strung, such as the use Piano Lamps of a "choir" of three strings rather than two for all but the lower notes, and the appliance of changed stringing methods. With the over strung scale, also called "cross-stringing", the strings are placed in a vertically overlapping slanted arrangement, with two heights of bridges on the soundboard instead of just one. This permits larger, but not necessarily longer, strings to fit within the case of the piano. Over stringing was invented by Jean-Henri Pape during the 1820s, and first patented for adoption in grand pianos in the United States by Henry Steinway Jr. in 1859.
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They are informally called birdcage pianos because of their prominent damper mechanism |
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| Pianinos were distinguished from the oblique, or diagonally strung upright fictional fashionable in France by Roller & Blanchet during the blown 1820s |
| The tiny spinet upright was manufactured from the mid-1930s until recent times |
| The deep position of the hammers required the benefit of a "drop action" to preserve a reasonable keyboard height. |
