Early years Herman Cable (June 1, 1849-1899), born on a farm in
Walton, New York, to Silas and Mary Goodrich Cable, was a student of such precociousness that he was at age 17 elected school principal in
Easton, Pennsylvania, and a year later appointed superintendent of schools in
Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He later got a job in
New York City with the publishing house of
Barnes and Co., which in 1869 (or 1870) sent him to Chicago to manage the western department. In the fall of 1879, Cable joined (or helped found, sources differ) the
Wolfinger Organ Co. Cable served as treasurer and director, along with F.R. Wolfinger, president, and John A. Comstock, secretary.'''''' Its offices and factory were in a three-story building at Randolph and Ann (today, Racine) Streets, owned by New York financier
Hetty Green and familiarly known as the Coan & Ten Broek carriage-factory after a previous occupant. A fire on April 18, 1880, caused damage initially estimated at $15,000 to $20,000, which was largely if not entirely covered by insurance.— but it also turned out furniture, sewing machine tops, elevator cabs, and more. After Cable arrived, the Wolfinger company began to separate out its various products; the furniture business, for example, would wind down by 1883.
Chicago Cottage Organ Co. (1880-1899) In 1880, the subsidiary that made reed organs was named
Chicago Cottage Organ Co. In 1885, the company added two partners: E.E. Wise and George W. Tewksbury, experienced organ makers who had worked for the Western Cottage Organ Co. of
Ottawa, Illinois. Williard Naramore Van Matre, Sr. (1851–1939) joined as sales manager and a stockholder; he would stay for 10 years Wolfinger sold his interest in the company to G.K. Barnes, who would himself divest in 1889. Cable became president after he and Tewksbury bought Wise out. Cable also brought his piano-making brothers into the business: Fayette S. Cable (b. March 18, 1855, in
Cannonsville, New York; d. February 22, 1920, in
Hinsdale, Illinois) and
Hobart M. Cable.
1891: Conover Piano acquired In 1891, Herman Cable made an acquisition that would help vault his company into the first rank of American piano manufacturers, and enable it to offer some of the finest pianos made. He bought the Conover Piano Company and hired its owner and main designer, J. Frank Conover (b. 1843 in
Mount Morris, New York; d. May 20, 1919). A serious student of music and acoustics from a young age, Conover had produced his first piano in 1875). The acquisition would turn "the enterprise into the largest wholesale and retail trade-in pianos and organs in the world." Ten years into its independent existence, Herman Cable's company was riding a boom that would later be called the
Golden Age of the Piano. As household income rose in the years before
radio,
recorded music, and automobiles became widely available, households and organizations alike purchased pianos and reed organs in prodigious amounts. In 1889, Chicago manufacturers produced some 6,760 pianos; in 1891, 10,900; and in 1892, 13,600. (The country's total estimated production in 1892 was 100,000 pianos, most made by manufacturers in and around New York City and Boston.) The city's production of reed organs was even higher: 46,000 in 1889, 49,300 in 1890, and 55,000 in 1892. Many of them were made by Chicago Cottage Organ Company, which in 1892 produced one-fifth of all U.S.-made reed organs. In 1893, Chicago Cottage and Conover Piano Company exhibited five organs and nine pianos in their double booth at the
World's Columbian Exposition, joining dozens of other organ and piano manufacturers in their city's coming-out party. A catalog issued during this period advertised 25 models of reed organ. (The building would be destroyed on March 16, 1898, in a deadly fire that injured a Conover employee. In 1899, Herman Cable died, and Fayette Cable took over as president.
Alfred Dolge, a fellow piano manufacturer, described Herman Cable's approach and impact in his 1911 book
Pianos and Their Makers: "Cable applied the methods used in selling books, as far as possible, to the organ and piano business, with amazing success. Like [fellow pianomaker William Wallace Kimball|William Wallace] Kimball, he was a born organizer and an excellent judge of men and their abilities. The training which he had enjoyed in the bookselling business impelled him to introduce system in his manufacturing and selling organization, with all that this word implies in modern business management, and perhaps he was the first in the piano industry to profit by the application of scientific
accounting. At all events, his success was so rapid, and his business assumed such immense proportions, that it became the wonder of his contemporaries."
The Cable Company (1900-1935) The first year of the 20th century brought a new name—
The Cable Company, Designed by
Holabird and Roche, it became known as the Cable Building during the company's 33-year tenure. The area around this block of Wabash, home to many musical-instrument manufacturers and vendors, became known as Chicago's "Music Row." No vendor's sign flew higher than "Cable Pianos". A sales brochure issued around this time offered 29 styles of reed organ with different designs and varying numbers of stops. The company numbered its organs with serial numbers: e.g., No. 43315 (made in 1892), No. 118189 (1894), No. 250783 (1907), and 260834 (1910).
1901: A second factory In 1901, the company built a second factory about 43 miles west of downtown Chicago in the city of
Saint Charles, Illinois. The complex, at 410 South 1st Street, had its own electric plant, and its location near the
Fox River and the
Chicago and North Western Railroad allowed it access to materials and components from around the world.The factory would be expanded in 1904 and 1909, to 5.7 acres of workspace on 11 acres of land. Lumber yards stored up to 11 million board-feet of wood. The Cable Co.'s new president was Frank S. Shaw, a prominent elder in the Presbyterian Church. He took control of a vigorous company still hungry for growth. In 1904, Cable Co. was spending more than $100,000 a year on advertising and "increasing its output in every way possible in order to meet the demand." In February, the company acquired a majority interest in
Mason & Hamlin, a struggling
Haverhill, Massachusetts-based piano company, in large part so it could use Mason's factory in
New York state to manufacture pianos for the
New York City market. (Cable would sell its interest in 1924 to the
American Piano Company. The year also saw the company enter the emerging market for player pianos. The first practical
pianola—a piano that could use pneumatic means to play music from rolls of perforated paper—had been developed in 1895 and subsequently produced and marketed by the
Aeolian Company. In 1904, the Cable Co. added a department to make its own player pianos, hiring inventor-manufacturer-salesman Paul Brown Klugh to design them and run the department. Klugh held patents on the Carola and Euphona models, and at the
Buffalo Convention of 1910, he would help lead the player-piano industry to standards that would allow rolls to be played on any manufacturers' instruments. The company also sold some 20 pianos that were installed in various State buildings at the
1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. By year's end, leading trade publications ranked the company among the world's top piano producers. The
Presto-Times declared it "the largest piano and organ makers in the world". A merger floated in early 1905 would have further padded the company's lead. In March, the
Wall Street Journal reported that a $5 million merger would combine Cable Piano and its Mason & Hamlin subsidiary with the Bush & Gerts Piano Company and the Strohber Piano Company. The deal was said to be pushed by George W. Peavey, a director of the Cable Company and its principal stockholder. Peavey, whose father had invented the
concrete grain elevator, owned the Peavey Grain Company of
Minneapolis, Minnesota. (His fellow directors were the company president, Shaw; Heffelfinger, heir to another grain fortune; Wells; Cleland; Ware; R.E. Walker; and D.G. Keefe. It also connected the two structures along the Cable Building's freight elevator. In 1906, the company reached the apogee of its reed-organ production capability: 24,000 per year. That year, U.S. pianomakers sold about 280,000 pianos, including about 20,000 player pianos. Sales slumped the following year, though the number of player pianos sold grew to about 22,000. In mid-1906, Klugh predicted the industry would sell about 250,000 pianos, about one-tenth of which would be player pianos. In 1908, the prices for the company's player pianos were: Conover inner-player piano, $900; the Corona inner-player piano, $750, the Kingsbury inner-player piano, $650, the Euphona inner-player piano, $500.
1913: George Dowling era In 1913, George Dowling, a sales specialist who joined the company as vice-president in 1908, was elected president. Klugh, the player-piano expert, became vice-president and a director; he would within two years debut the "Solo-Carona Inner-Player," a player piano whose novel mechanism allowed for more control of dynamics and accent. A 1915 advertisement offered to reimburse train fare to the company's Chicago showroom upon purchase of a piano. Around 1916, The Cable Company produced some 8,000 pianos: 7,000 by the Conover factory and another 1,000 in the Mason & Hamlin factory. A 38-year era came to an end in 1918, when the company ceased its production of reed organs. But it had picked up other areas of trade. In 1916, the Cable Company purchased the Percy S. Foster Piano Company, a piano dealership in
Washington, D.C. (The store, at 1330 G Street NW, had once supplied four Conover Baby Grands for $750 apiece to the
Washington Herald, which gave them away as contest prizes.) It operated a "small goods" supply featuring musical instruments produced by the
Gretsch and
Martin companies. in 1915 and 1922, selling thousands to school districts around the country. During the
Great War and into the 1920s, it also donated song sheets—with advertisements for its instruments to community-music programs at civilian-military preparedness camps. In 1922, ''The Purchaser's Guide to the Music Industries'' called the Cable Co. "One of the largest, most distinguished, enterprising and wealthy concerns in the piano and player-piano industries" and said it was "recognized as one of the 'great leaders' in the trade." Its pianos were sold by "a large number of branch houses and hundreds of agencies" including ones in "the principal cities of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia". Its Conover pianos were noted as belonging to "the highest grade manufactured". In 1924, the company had a store in
Knoxville, Tennessee, but had closed its store in
Chattanooga. In May 1928, during the 27th
annual convention of the
National Association of Music Merchants at the
Hotel Commodore, Dowling presided over the annual Cable Breakfast, a banquet for its dealers, their families, and other friends of the company at the nearby
Hotel Biltmore. But the company was not listed among the exhibitors at the convention itself. In 1929, the Cable Piano Company had several regional-headquarters stores outside Chicago, including in Atlanta (84 North Broad street), Detroit (1264 Library Avenue), Minneapolis (Nicollet Avenue at Eighth Street), and Toledo (209 Superior Street). The arrival of the
phonograph in the early 1900s and
commercial radio in the 1920s had exerted steadily growing pressure on piano makers. Total U.S. sales for the industry had peaked around 300,000 in 1924, representing roughly $100 million in revenue ($ today). But sales decreased steadily thereafter. In the final year of the
Roaring Twenties, piano makers sold an estimated 115,000 instruments. In a sign of the times, Cable's Chicago showroom had begun selling radios, including the Erla
screen grid radio from Electrical Research Laboratories at 22nd and Paulina. The
1929 stock market crash hit the Cable Company hard. Within weeks of the crash, near Thanksgiving, the company laid off workers at St. Charles factory. The ensuing
Great Depression weakened the entire industry further. By 1932, when the nation's pianomakers sold just 27,000 pianos,
Merger and aftermath (1936 and beyond) In 1936, the Cable Company merged with the
Schiller Piano Company of
Oregon, Illinois, to become the
Schiller Cable Manufacturing Company. The St. Charles factory was closed on Jan. 7, 1937, then razed in September 2000 to make way for a residential development. The site is now occupied by condominiums and mixed-use buildings. Like most of the country's musical-instrument manufacturers, it halted production during World War II. In 1943, the company was taken over by
Winter and Company, another piano manufacturer, and William G. Heller became its president. On December 1, 1945, the Schiller Cable Manufacturing Co. was renamed the
Conover-Cable Piano Co. In 1947, it was one of just seven piano manufacturers left in Illinois. Winter & Co. was merged into the
Aeolian Company, which sold pianos under the Cable brand until 1958, the Conover brand from 1960 to 1965, and the Conover-Cable brand until 1982. The Conover Cable brand name, however, survived into the early 21st century.
Samick, a South Korean manufacturer of musical instruments, trademarked the name in 1997 and used it in some markets for pianos sold elsewhere under the Samick brand. By 2010, pianos bearing the name Conover Cable were available only by special order. In 2012, Samick stopped selling pianos under the name. ==Brands==