Attempts to construct harplike instruments controlled from a keyboard date back to the early seventeenth century.
Philip Hainhofer
saw in Dresden and recorded in his travel diary of 1629 ain Instrument, dessen besaitetes Corpus, wie aine Harpfen, in die Höhe aufgerichtet ist, und das Clavier unten hat (an instrument, the strung corpus of which reaches upward, harp-wise, and has the keyboard at the bottom
).
Mersenne
refers to a new form of spinet
of similar nature in use in Italy,...
