Jonas Chickering was born on April 05, 1798 at Mason Village, New Hampshire, United States. He was the third child of Abner and Eunice (Dakin) Chickering. Shortly after his birth the family moved to New Ipswich, New Hampshire, where Jonas spent his boyhood in his father’s blacksmith shop and on the family farm.
At the age of seventeen Jonas apprenticed himself to a cabinet-maker, and toward the end of his apprenticeship undertook to repair the only piano in the village. In this task his skill as a cabinet-maker was happily combined with his passion for music and he discovered his life work.
About 1818 Chickering left for Boston where he secured employment in the shop of a certain John Osborne, one of the few Americans who were then making pianos. For five years Chickering labored to master every detail in the art of piano making, and then in 1823 in partnership with a Scotchman, James Stewart, commenced to manufacture pianos under the firm-name of Stewart & Chickering. Stewart soon returned to Europe and Chickering for some years conducted the enterprise alone. Needing capital he established a partnership in 1830 with Captain John Mackay, a capitalist and sea-captain, whose faith in Chickering led him to invest heavily in the concern. Mackay not only furnished the needed money, thus allowing his partner to devote his whole energy to the technical end, but himself transported and sold pianos in South America, loading on the home voyage with rosewood and mahogany. Mackay was lost at sea in 1841, and Chickering bought out his heirs, supervising until his death the financial as well as the mechanical end of the rapidly growing business.
Chickering’s fame, however, rests not so much upon the fact that he founded and developed one of the earliest and largest of the American piano manufacturing houses, but upon the numerous improvements which he introduced. The difficulty of keeping the earlier grand pianos in tune was conquered by Chickering in 1837 when he succeeded in casting an iron frame built to sustain the great tension necessary to a piano of good quality. In that year he built the first grand piano with a full iron frame in a single casting.
Samuel Babcock, it is true, had already experimented with the iron frame but Chickering first perfected it and first applied it to the grand piano. This opened a new era in the making of pianos and justified William Steinway in describing Chickering as the “father of American piano fortemaking. ”
In 1843 the firm patented a new deflection of the strings and in 1845 Chickering invented the first practical method of over-stringing grand pianos. In 1852, the Chickering factory on Washington St. , Boston, burned, but with characteristic energy, Chickering laid the foundation of a greater establishment on Tremont Street, which, when finished, was thought to be the largest building in the United States with the exception of the Capitol at Washington.
Jonas Chickering laid down the base of the American piano manufacturing system and made the great contribution to the development of musical appreciation in America. He was the founder of Chickering & Company which built by the time of his death over 12, 000 pianos. He was also responsible for the development of a revolutionary one-piece cast-iron frame. His pianos at the London International Exhibition of 1851 earned a gold medal.
Chickering joined the Handel and Haydn Society in 1818 and later served as trustee and as president (1843 - 1850). His mechanical ability was recognized by his election to the presidency of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association.
Chickering was an indefatigable worker and until the end of his life could be found in his immense factory clad in his mechanic’s apron and engrossed in the technical end of piano production. As he was shy and retiring in disposition, his rise was due almost solely to his industry and genius. He was also beloved for his unostentatious charity.
On November 30, 1823, Chickering was married to Elizabeth Sumner Harraden. They had four children: Thomas E. Chickering, C. Frank Chickering, George H. Chickering, and Anna Chickering.
