Post Horn in Bb by Isaac Fiske, about 1843

When this American post horn, or small trumpet in Bb first came to light, I added it to my existing page on a very early cornet made by Isaac Fiske. The two instruments were likely made much less than ten years apart, but show a very interesting and rapid evolution in the technology and culture of the time. The only other instrument by Fiske with double piston valves, likely made in about 1848, is an Eb soprano saxhorn with piston action, somewhat like that which he used on his rotary valve instruments two decades later. These three, along with two Eb keyed bugles, are all of the known output by this great American brass instrument maker during the 1840s. It would be impossible to guess the number of these instruments that he had made, but we do know that he was sharing shop space with other businesses. Getting the business started, almost certainly lacking in resources and likely doing other work to survive, his output must have been less than E.G. Wright in nearby Boston and Graves & Co in Winchester, New Hampshire. His business did grow and by 1851, Fiske was making instruments with rotary valves, for which he is justifiably best known for.

Graves & Co., S.W. Richardson, Allen & Co. and E.G. Wright were also producing post horns (along with Eb keyed bugles) of very similar designs and each of them no more than a year or two before Fiske. These are very close copies of instruments made in Mainz Germany and it can be speculated that parts or whole instruments were imported from there. But it does seem more likely that these four shops were all working very hard to develop this domestic industry, perhaps through some collaboration.

Thomas Paine, who worked with E.G. Wright in Boston for a short time in about 1841, is known to have made rotary valve instruments by 1848, but again we don’t know where the technology came from. The Providence Gazette reported in March of 1845 that the Providence Brigade Band was performing a concert on a set of 12 valved instruments made by Paine. This was several years before the first evidence that he was making rotary valves, so I presume that these were also double piston valves similar to this post horn. None of these instruments are known to exist, so we can only hope that more information or instruments from this period will surface in the future. These facts were reported in Dr. Robert Elisaon’s “Early American Brass Makers”, and from the time that he first made a study of instrument makers, connections between them have mostly eluded us.

The later output of these five shops were some of the highest quality rotary valve instruments and it seems likely that the technology came to them, in large part, from immigrant workers from Saxony. Among them, Louis Hartmann first arrived in the US in 1839 at the age of 12. His father was a member of the instrument maker’s guild in Markneukirchen, but it seems unlikely that Louis had enough knowledge of brass instrument making in his ‘teens to have had much influence on the New England makers during the 1840s. In fact, he travelled back to Saxony years later and returned in 1848 with the profession of “Instrumentmaker”. Henry Esbach first came to the US in 1847, listed on the ship’s passenger list as a mechanic. He worked for E.G. Wright for a couple of years, travelled back to Germany, returning in 1850 with profession of “Instrumentmacher”. Esbach and Hartmann were partners in and driving force behind the Boston Musical Instrument Manufactory that they formed in 1869 with E.G. Wright.

In addition, seven “Instrumentmakers” arrived in the US on the same boat in 1854 from Germany. The ships log included four members of the Huttl family and a few others that were known to work in the four brass instrument making shops in Boston at various times. These men seem to have had an important influence on that industry at the time, but I haven’t been able to find any evidence of European makers coming to work there during the early1840s. Hopefully, future research will shed more light on how these five instrument makers learned their craft.

The bore diameter in this post horn is the smallest that I’ve come across. At .328”, it’s about .002” smaller than the earliest Graves post horns. In image 7, the Graves is top. The Fiske is also smaller through curved tube between the third valve and tuning slide and slightly smaller through the bell taper. The bell diameter is 4 3/8”, which is larger than the Graves, but the overall length is slightly less at 12 11/16”. These two very early instruments were both likely made right about 1843 in shops about 60 miles apart. As much as they look very similar, there are no parts that appear to have come from the same maker. While the Fiske appears to be a well made instrument, it is lacking any brace between the tuning slide wrap and the bell and valve section, giving it a very flimsy feel when drawing out any of the tuning slides. This shouldn’t be very surprising in one of Isaac Fiske’s very first instruments and we are very fortunate that it has survived in as good a state as it has.

Restoration involved re-making the complete second valve slide assembly. Making the crook was quite a challenge and I cover this process on my Mechanics page on making small crooks.

It’s very possible that the half step (shortest valve slide) was on the first valve as on the Graves, but I have no way of knowing this and it seemed appropriate to put the whole step slide assembly back where I found it. You can see in the image of the unrestored instrument, that all of the slides had been detached and sloppily re-mounted.

Below is the photo one of the valve piston assemblies, showing that the ports are formed using corks, rather than soldered tubes or curved brass sheet. I have seen corks used for this purpose in very early European made double piston valves and Stolzel valves, so it isn’t surprising, but I have not seen this in any other US made examples.

The mouthpiece that was found with this instrument was not likely made by Fiske at the time that the instrument was made, but used on it during its original use. It is similar to French cornet mouthpieces of the time and interestingly, has the rim soldered on, almost certainly a modification.