Ongoing History Daily: What was the first musical instrument to run on electricity?
For centuries, all instruments were acoustic because no one had discovered electricity. So what was the first instrument to need electricity to work? That’s complicated.
Back in about 1748, a Czech scientist named Václav Prokop Diviš invented an electromagnetic keyboard he called the “Golden Dionysus.” Unfortunately, we don’t know much about it. We know a little more about the Clavecin Electrique, an “electric harpsichord” invented by Jean-Baptiste Delaborde, a Jesuit priest, in 1759.
After that, there’s Matthias Hipp’s “electromagnetic piano,” an old-school player piano that ran on a series of magnets. There were a few other attempts but really nothing properly electric emerged until Lee de Forest’s “Audion Piano” in 1915. It was the first true electronic instrument because it used a flow of electricity rather than magnets.
By the 1920s, once de Forest’s technology was in place, the race to build electronic instruments took off.