The Cable Company (earlier, Wolfinger Organ Company, Chicago Cottage Organ Company; sometimes called by the name of its subsidiary, The Cable Piano Company) was an American manufacturer and distributor of pianos and reed organs that operated independently from 1880 to 1936.
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the company proclaimed itself "the world's greatest manufacturer of pianos, inner player pianos, and organs". It was indubitably one of the largest, and maintained that status for several decades during the apogee of U.S. piano sales, the so-called Golden Age of the Piano. Trade publications of its day called it "the largest reed organ house in the world, and the largest wholesaler in the world of medium-grade pianos" (1895); "the largest piano and organ makers in the world" (1904); and "one of the 'great leaders' in the trade" (1922). Its premium Conover line of pianos was described as belonging to "the highest grade manufactured".
The decline of the piano market in the late 1920s followed by the Great Depression forced The Cable Company to merge with another northern-Illinois piano maker in 1936, becoming The Schiller Cable Manufacturing Company. In 1950, the merged company was subsumed into the Aeolian Company, which closed in 1984.
History
Early years Herman Cable (June 1, 1849-1899), born on a farm in Walton, New York, to Silas and Mary Goodrich Cable, was a student of such precociousness that he was at age 17 elected school principal in Easton, Pennsylvania, and a year later appointed superintendent of schools in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He later got a job in New York City with the publishing house of Barnes and Co., which in 1869 (or 1870) sent him to Chicago to manage the western department.
In the fall of 1879, Cable joined (or helped found, sources differ) the Wolfinger Organ Co. Cable served as treasurer and director, along with F.R. Wolfinger, president, and John A. Comstock, secretary. Its offices and factory were in a three-story building at Randolph and Ann (today, Racine) Streets, owned by New York financier Hetty Green and familiarly known as the Coan & Ten Broek carriage-factory after a previous occupant. A fire on April 18, 1880, caused damage initially estimated at $15,000 to $20,000, which was largely if not entirely covered by insurance.
The Wolfinger factory made small reed organs—"cottage organs"— but it also turned out furniture, sewing machine tops, elevator cabs, and more. After Cable arrived, the Wolfinger company began to separate out its various products; the furniture business, for example, would wind down by 1883.
Chicago Cottage Organ Co. (1880-1899)
In 1880, the subsidiary that made reed organs was named Chicago Cottage Organ Co.
In 1885, the company added two partners: E.E. Wise and George W. Tewksbury, experienced organ makers who had worked for the Western Cottage Organ Co. of Ottawa, Illinois. Williard Naramore Van Matre, Sr. (1851–1939) joined as sales manager and a stockholder; he would stay for 10 years before leaving to start the Straube Piano Company.
On March 12, 1886, another fire broke out in the factory at Randolph and Ann, this one gutting the building and destroying more than 2,000 organs in various states of completion. "Cable estimated the damage to the stock to be $50,000 and to the machinery $25,000. The company carried $40,550 insurance, carried by several companies," the Chicago Tribune reported. Most of the company's 174 employees were kept on as the company improvised workspaces in the neighborhood. Lots were purchased on January 8, 1887, and a new plant constructed on the southwest corner of Paulina Street and 22nd Street (today's Cermak Road).A 1926 advertisement gives the factory's office address as 2214 Paulina.
Wolfinger sold his interest in the company to G.K. Barnes, who would himself divest in 1889. Cable became president after he and Tewksbury bought Wise out. Cable also brought his piano-making brothers into the business: Fayette S. Cable (b. March 18, 1855, in Cannonsville, New York; d. February 22, 1920, in Hinsdale, Illinois) and Hobart M. Cable. Both continued to make pianos under their own names.
By 1889, the Chicago Cottage Organ Company was building its own pianos; that year, it made 200 under the name of Chicago Cottage Piano. Still, its main interest in pianos was as a wholesaler of medium-quality instruments made by other companies.
1891: Conover Piano acquired In 1891, Herman Cable made an acquisition that would help vault his company into the first rank of American piano manufacturers, and enable it to offer some of the finest pianos made. He bought the Conover Piano Company and hired its owner and main designer, J. Frank Conover (b. 1843 in Mount Morris, New York; d. May 20, 1919). A serious student of music and acoustics from a young age, Conover had produced his first piano in 1875 and four years later opened a store with his brother George in Kansas City. He subsequently opened a piano store in St. Louis, where one fine day, he sold five Steinway grands and two Steinway uprights. In 1881, he sold both stores and began to design pianos in New York City. His pianos, made with several improvements that he earned patents for, were soon renowned for their fine quality and unusually good tone. But the firm struggled, and Conover was persuaded to sell the business to Cable and sign on as its director of piano manufacturing. He would remain with the company until his death in 1919.
In January 1892, the Conover Piano Company began operating as a subsidiary with a Chicago factory at Lake and Peoria Streets. Herman Cable became the president of the Conover firm as well as of the Chicago Cottage Company (whose other officers were Hobart Cable, vice-president; Fayette Cable, secretary; and Tewksbury, treasurer). The acquisition would turn "the enterprise into the largest wholesale and retail trade-in pianos and organs in the world."
Ten years into its independent existence, Herman Cable's company was riding a boom that would later be called the Golden Age of the Piano. As household income rose in the years before radio, recorded music, and automobiles became widely available, households and organizations alike purchased pianos and reed organs in prodigious amounts. In 1889, Chicago manufacturers produced some 6,760 pianos; in 1891, 10,900; and in 1892, 13,600. (The country's total estimated production in 1892 was 100,000 pianos, most made by manufacturers in and around New York City and Boston.) The city's production of reed organs was even higher: 46,000 in 1889, 49,300 in 1890, and 55,000 in 1892. Many of them were made by Chicago Cottage Organ Company, which in 1892 produced one-fifth of all U.S.-made reed organs.
They were produced at the Paulina Street factory, the "most extensive reed organ manufactory in the world." A sales catalog from the late 1890s boasted of its "three immense buildings" with more than three acres of flooring, plus smaller structures, lumber yards, and more. "Five steel boilers, with an engine of 350 horse power, furnish the necessary power to run more than 100 different kinds of machines, which are of the latest improved patterns and many of them especially designed for our work," the catalog said. At any given time, some 4,000 organs were in various stages of production, with 2,000 completed sets of internal workings on hand, while 600 to 800 completed organs stood ready for quick shipping. The company reckoned it could produce 18,000 organs a year, or one every 10 minutes, should the public demand it.
In 1893, Chicago Cottage and Conover Piano Company exhibited five organs and nine pianos in their double booth at the World's Columbian Exposition, joining dozens of other organ and piano manufacturers in their city's coming-out party.
By 1895, the company had built and shipped some 150,000 organs. A catalog issued during this period advertised 25 models of reed organ. On May 1, the company opened a new factory for Conover pianos next to the Paulina Street organ factory; it was soon producing 2,000 pianos annually. It also expanded into several floors of the Ayer Building (built in 1890 or 1893 as the A. H. Andrews Building) at 215-221 (S.) Wabash Ave. in Chicago. The seven-story building was leased by the Conover Piano Company, which occupied half of the bottom floor while Chicago Cottage Organ Co. used the second floor. (The building would be destroyed on March 16, 1898, in a deadly fire that injured a Conover employee. The company moved down the street to 258 and 260 Wabash.)
Around this time, the company hired Justin Percival Sjoberg to run its Kingsbury production line, which he did for eight years before leaving to found a piano-parts making company. Sjoberg went on to found another company that focused on coin-operated and automated pianos; it became the mammoth Seeburg Corporation.
Herman Cable had become a prominent member of Chicago's business and social community; an 1895 capsule biography notes that he belonged to the Masons, Knights Templar, the Chicago Union League, and the Country Club of Evanston. He had married Alice A. Hutchins of Chicago in 1883; together they had three children and lived in Evanston.
In 1899, the Chicago Tribune took note of "a daylight special train-load of sixteen cars filled with Kingsbury, Cable and Conover Pianos and Chicago Cottage Organs," shipped by the Erie Railroad to a distributor in Binghamton, New York. "There is no better indication of the prosperous times in our country than by the extensive sale of Pianos and Organs," the Tribune wrote. "This is said to be the largest single shipment of Pianos and Organs ever made at one time and shows the rapid strides Chicago is making in the Music Industry."
In 1899, Herman Cable died, and Fayette Cable took over as president.
Alfred Dolge, a fellow piano manufacturer, described Herman Cable's approach and impact in his 1911 book Pianos and Their Makers: "Cable applied the methods used in selling books, as far as possible, to the organ and piano business, with amazing success. Like [fellow pianomaker William Wallace] Kimball, he was a born organizer and an excellent judge of men and their abilities. The training which he had enjoyed in the bookselling business impelled him to introduce system in his manufacturing and selling organization, with all that this word implies in modern business management, and perhaps he was the first in the piano industry to profit by the application of scientific accounting. At all events, his success was so rapid, and his business assumed such immense proportions, that it became the wonder of his contemporaries."
The Cable Company (1900-1935)
The first year of the 20th century brought a new name—The Cable Company, changed on March 5—and a big new headquarters and showroom in Chicago's Loop area. In 1900, the company leased the brand-new 10-story building at 57 East Jackson Boulevard (on the southeastern corner of E. Jackson and Wabash Ave.). Designed by Holabird and Roche, it became known as the Cable Building during the company's 33-year tenure. The area around this block of Wabash, home to many musical-instrument manufacturers and vendors, became known as Chicago's "Music Row." No vendor's sign flew higher than "Cable Pianos".
A sales brochure issued around this time offered 29 styles of reed organ with different designs and varying numbers of stops. The company numbered its organs with serial numbers: e.g., No. 43315 (made in 1892), No. 118189 (1894), No. 250783 (1907), and 260834 (1910).
1900 also saw the departure of Hobart Cable, who purchased the Burdett Organ Co. in La Porte, Indiana, and renamed it the Hobart M. Cable Co. The firm would operate until the 1960s; brand licensing would keep new pianos bearing the Hobart name late into the 20th century.
1901: A second factory