Scan 132
The violin & its story : or the history & construction of the violin, 1905
13 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 116. See the scan on archive.org.
1ments, sold for ten guineas; his best bows, ornamented with silver, and with ebony nut, sold at £3; and his ordinary bows, without ornament of any kind, sold at thirty shillings.
3Up to 1775, neither the length and weight of a bow, nor the conditions of its balance in the hand, were in any way fixed. With the advice of the famous artists with whom he conferred, Tourte fixed the length of the violin bow (including the head) at 74 or 75 centimetres; the viola bow at 74; and the 'cello bow at 72 to 73.* At the same time, also, he decided the distance of the hair from the stick by the size of the head and nut. By these proportions he also pitched on the necessary angle at which the hair should be to properly grip the strings, and got rid of the disadvantage arising from the hair coming into contact with the stick. As his bows had a higher head, and therefore a heavier head, than those of his predecessors, he increased in a marked degree the weight of the lower end of the bow, so that the point of greatest weight was brought close to the hand, and the essential balance preserved. With this object he freely loaded the tip and the head with metal ornaments, in order to increase their weight.
5Vuillaume, to whom we are indebted for this account of Tourte, himself saw how Tourte sawed up his blocks of Brazil wood so as to get the right grain, and how he got the right curves by heating the wood. Some few maintained that Tourte did not bend his sticks by means of heat, but that he sawed them out of the required form. But this idea is directly contradicted by the fact that the fibre of the wood runs right through the bent stick, the advantages of which Tourte soon recognised. He also made it a principle that the wood must be heated all through alike, the centre as well as the outside.
7* 72 centimetres = 28.347 inches.
873 ,, = 28.741 ,,
974 ,, = 29.134 ,,
1075 ,, = 29.328 ,,
12—Translator.
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