Italian maker of musical instruments Bartolomeo Cristofori was born #OTD in 1655.
Cristofori's most significant invention, the piano, came about as he sought to develop a new keyboard instrument that could offer a greater dynamic range than the harpsichord. His groundbreaking idea was to create a mechanism where the strings were struck by hammers, allowing the volume of sound to vary with the force applied to the keys, the so called "gravicembalo col piano e forte".
