Theobald boehm - The inventor of the modern day flute
Theobald Boehm is the inventor of the flute that we have now. He was born in 1794 in Munich and was trained as a jeweler and a goldsmith. He loved music even when he was a young boy. By 1818 he was a goldsmith, flute-maker and a professional flutist in a orchestra of the royal court in Munich. By 1828, Theobald had put together a workshop to manufacture instruments. Then in 1831, when he was visiting in London, he attended a concert of Charles Nicholson whose flute has unusual large finger holes which produced a large tone. He then designed a new mechanism that functioned as an extension of the fingers. In 1846, Theobald continued to perfect the flute while he studied at the University of Munich. Finally in 1847, Theobald produced a different instrument with a cylindrical body, foot joint, and a parabolic head joint. The tone holes were even larger than the ones on the 1832 instrument and he designed padded cups for each of the holes. Still to this day Boehm's flute remains the unchanged.