Of this family there were four members living and working between 1591 and 1651, or later, who achieved great reputation. Their instruments are known by their signatures and by the monograms forming the ornamental rosette, or sound-hole, in the soundboard—a survival from the psaltery. The great improvement of the harpsichord is attributed to Hans, the eldest, who by adding to the two unison strings of each note a third of shorter length and finer wire, tuned an octave higher, increased the power and brilliancy of the tone. To employ this addition at will alone, or with one or both the unison strings, he contrived, after the example of the organ, a second keyboard, and stops to be moved by the hand, for the control of the registers, or slides, of jacks acting upon the strings. By these expedients all the legitimate variety ever given to the harpsichord was secured. The Ruckers harpsichord given by Messrs. Broadwood to the South Kensington Museum, signed and dated “Andreas Ruckers me fecit Antverpiae 1651,” said to have been left by Handel to Christopher Smith, shows these additions to the construction, and was, in the writer’s remembrance, before the soundboard gave way, of deliciously soft and delicately reedy _timbre_. The tension being comparatively small, these harpsichords lasted much longer than our modern pianofortes. “When the Ruckers family passed away we hear no more of Antwerp as the city of harpsichord makers; London and Paris took up the tale.”[93] A Fleming named Tabel established himself in England, and his pupils Tschudi (or Shudi) and Kirchmann (or Kirkman) developed the harpsichord to its utmost and produced what in those days was considered a big tone. The earliest mention of the pianoforte, or forte-piano rather, occurs in the records of the Este family, in the letters addressed to Alfonso II, Duke of Modena, by an instrument-maker named Paliarino. The invention of the pianoforte is, however, given to Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori (1651-1731), a harpsichord maker of Padua, who removed to Florence at the wish of his patron, Prince Ferdinand de’ Medici. Cristofori then produced instruments with the hammer mechanism. A stone in Santa Croce, Florence, to Bartolomeo Cristofori records that he was the inventor of the “Clavicembalo col Piano e Forté.” However, the hammer head was small and there was no check to control the hammer in its rebound. At first the pianoforte was not much liked by the musicians. It required a new kind of touch; but as makers added improvements the new instrument gained in popularity and gradually supplanted the harpsichord. Bach did not care for it. His favorite instrument was the clavichord; and he often said “that he found no soul in the clavecin, or spinet, and that the pianoforte was too clumsy and harsh.”