Steel wire Strings.
Steel spun wire Lapped strings.
Covered copper wire " " lowest notes.

_Various._

Ivory White keys.

Black lead To smooth the rubbing surfaces of cloth
or leather in the action.

Glue (of a particular quality \
made expressly for |-- Woodwork throughout.
this trade. /

Beeswax, emery paper, \
glass paper, French polish, |-- Cleaning and finishing.
oil, putty powder, |
spirits of wine, &c., &c. /

Such are the materials used. The processes to which they are subjected
are far more numerous. So numerous are they and so complicated, that the
Steinways, who employ five hundred and twelve men, and labor-saving
machinery which does the work of five hundred men more, aided by three
steam-engines of a hundred and twenty-five, fifty, and twenty-five
horse-power, can only produce from forty-five to fifty-five pianos a
week. The average number is about fifty,--six grand, four upright, and
forty square. The reader has seen, doubtless, a piano with the top taken
off; but perhaps it has never occurred to him what a tremendous _pull_
those fifty to sixty strings are keeping up, day and night, from one
year's end to another. The shortest and thinnest string of all pulls two
hundred and sixty-two pounds,--about as much as we should care to lift;
and the entire pull of the strings of a grand piano is sixty pounds less
than twenty tons,--a load for twenty cart-horses. The fundamental
difficulty in the construction of a piano has always been to support
this continuous strain. When we look into a piano we see the "iron
frame" so much vaunted in the advertisements, and so splendid with
bronze and gilding; but it is not this thin plate of cast-iron that
resists the strain of twenty tons. If the wires were to pull upon the
iron for one second, it would fly into atoms. The iron plate is screwed
to what is called the "bottom" of the piano, which is a mass of timber
four inches thick, composed of three layers of plank glued together, and
so arranged that the pull of the wires shall be in a line with the grain
of the wood. The iron plate itself is subjected to a long course of
treatment. The rough casting is brought from the foundery, placed under
the drilling-machine, which bores many scores of holes of various sizes
with marvellous rapidity. Then it is smoothed and finished with