The first musical instruments with
piston valves were developed just after the start of the 19th century.
Stölzel valve The first of these types was the Stölzel valve, bearing the name of its inventor
Heinrich Stölzel, who first applied these valves to the
French horn in 1814. Until that point, there had been no successful valve design, and horn players had to stop off the
bell of the instrument, greatly compromising tone quality to achieve a partial
chromatic scale. In a Stölzel valve, the air enters through the bottom of the valve casing, up through the hollow bottom end of the piston, and through a port to the valve loop. The air is then led through an oblique port in the piston to a short tube connecting the valves where it is then directed through the second valve and out the bottom. This type of valve, however, had inherent problems. It forced the air to double back on itself and the 90 degree turns disrupted the bore, causing significant undesired back-pressure. These problems were improved upon later by the double-piston valve.
Double-piston valve , with three Vienna valves actuated by key rods The
double-piston valve, also called the
Vienna valve or
pumpenvalve, is a type of valve that preceded the modern piston valve. It was first reported in 1821 on a
trumpet built by
Christian Friedrich Sattler of
Leipzig, and later patented in 1823 by maker Joseph Riedl and horn player Joseph Kail. In this valve type, the simultaneous movement of two pistons bends the air flow in two right angles to introduce an additional valve loop. These turns cause constrictions in the
bore, that make the instrument harder to play. At first, the two pistons were operated by a lever connected with braces, but later valves use a mechanism patented by instrument builder Leopold Uhlmann in 1830. These are operated by long rods connecting the pistons to keys on the other side of the instrument and fitted with clocksprings. While they have fallen out of favor compared to modern valves in almost all places, they are often called "Vienna valves" because they are still used almost exclusively in
Vienna, Austria, where players prefer the smooth
legato and
natural horn–like timbre. The Vienna system was in common use in Germany on many brass instruments including trumpets up to 1850, and as
Système Belge on valve trombones in Belgium into the early 20th Century.
Berlin valve In 1833, Prussian military bandmaster
Wilhelm Friedrich Wieprecht applied to patent his valve design which used a piston to switch paths where the input, output, and valve ports are attached perpendicularly to the outer valve cylinder in the same plane. He patented the first tuba, the in F, with Berlin instrument maker
Johann Gottfried Moritz in 1838. Later known as , Paris instrument maker
Adolphe Sax also used Berlin valves for his earliest
saxhorns and other brass instruments in the 1840s, before switching to Périnet valves by 1860.
Périnet valve The modern piston valve was invented by
François Périnet and patented in 1839. They are sometimes called Périnet valves after the inventor. They work by diverting air obliquely through ports in the stock of the valve, so that a loop of tubing is included in the air stream, thus lowering the pitch. The stock of the valve is cylindrical and moves up and down through a larger cylindrical casing. A small Périnet valve integrated into a trombone mouthpiece, perpendicular to the shank in order to change the throat diameter to facilitate the upper register, was patented by Charles E. Stacy in 1924.
Adolphe Sax invented instruments with six independent piston valves (three for each hand), but only the most dexterous musicians were able to play them. The long lengths of extra tubing used by each of the six valves also made the instruments heavy and cumbersome to play. Modern valve brass instruments not using either rotary or Vienna valves use this type of valve in a set of three configured to lower the instrument by two, one, and three half-steps respectively, which in combination lower the instrument pitch by up to a
tritone. Some instruments (e.g. the tuba and euphonium) add a fourth valve that further lowers the pitch by a perfect fourth. ==Rotary valve==