THE ROMANTIC TRUMPET - Historic Brass Society

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the 1840s. 152
Outside Austria it was rather the Kail-Riedl type of valve which inspired imitation and
improvement, notably by Carl August Muller (1804-1870) of Mainz. Muller was born in
Adorf (Saxony) and moved to Mainz, where he worked for Schott in 1824, becoming
independent in 1827. Some of his instruments have a particularly elegant design due to the
long leaf springs activating the touch-pieces of the return mechanism. 153
A Bavarian variant of a return mechanism, generally associated with instruments
displaying two double-piston valves and also made in Saxony and in Switzerland (by
Hirsbrunner in Sumiswald and others), displays two long levers attached to powerful leaf
springs. This model—with the half-step fingered "1" and the whole-step "2", just the reverse
of conventional practice—was first built around 1828-40 but can be found on steel
engravings of village musicians as late as the 1880s. 154
Another variant of the double-piston valve, called the systeme belge 155 and probably
developed in the early 1840s, has a return mechanism with short pistons mounted parallel
to the valve slides, requiring the instrument to be held with the slides pointing upwards.
Finally, an English variant of what at first glance seem to be Vienna valves are the
double-piston valves patented on 3 April 1849 by Richard Garrett. An example of his
"Registered Double Piston Cornopean" survives. 156 With Garrett's model, the valve slides
are separate from the valve casings, and the uncomplicated push-button return mechanism
is mounted directly at the casing ends; the instrument is held like a piston-valved one, with
the double pistons pointing downwards.
Rotary valves. Bluhmel and Stoelzel did not apply for a Prussian patent on the rotary
valve until 1828, although both of them had worked on this type of valve even before their
first patent was granted ten years earlier and Bluhmel had had a trumpet fitted out with an
early kind of rotary valve by 1819. 157 They wished to apply this third type of valve to the
trumpet and trombone, reserving the tubular valve for the hom. 158 Their (separate) patent
applications were denied, however, since their original patent was considered to have
covered the invention of the valve per se, and not variants of the valve principle.
Independently and peripherally around 1830, two makers built rotary-valved trumpets
which had no following: the American Nathan Adams (1783-1864) built a three-valved F
trumpet, 159 and the otherwise unknown Yverdon firm of Schupbach & Guichard built a
two-valved D trumpet with a primitive (and leaky) mechanism. 160
Riedl, again working together with Kail, received the first patent (or "privilege") for a
rotary valve (called a Rad-Maschine) in 1835. 161 Kail is said to have been inspired in 1827
by his observation of beer spigots. 162 Riedl's rotary valve was operated by the barrel-spring
return mechanism invented in 1830 by Uhlmann. The Prussian music director Wieprecht
found the "Prague rotary valve" to be best for the high brass instruments and piston valves
for the low ones; from about 1844 onwards, Prussian soprano and piccolo cornets were
generally made with rotary valves. 163
Of the many adaptations of the rotary valve to the present day, one of the most
interesting is the flat-windway valve (Ger. gequetschte Maschine, 164 literally "squeezed valve
section") or Allen valve, first made around 1850 by J. Lathrop Allen (1815-ca. 1905) of