Harp lute

The harp lute, or dital harp, is a musical instrument that combines features of harp and lute and to increase its compass of the latter. It was invented in 1795 by Edward Light.[1], (though an earlier form is shown in the "Garden of Earthly Delights" (~1500) by Hieronymus Bosch).

Georg Henry Harlow: Kitty Stephens (1794-1882) with a harp lute


Description
An early 19th century harp lute being played by Taro Takeuchi

The harp lute owes the first part of its name to the characteristic mechanism for shortening the effective length of the strings; its second name of "dital harp" emphasizes the nature of the stops, which are worked by the thumb in contradistinction to the pedals of the harp worked by the feet.[1]

This instrument consists of a pear-shaped body, to which is added a curved neck supported on a front pillar or arm springing from the body, and therefore reminiscent of the harp. There are twelve catgut strings. The curved fingerboard, almost parallel with the neck, is provided with frets, and has in addition a thumbkey for each string, by means of which the accordance of the string is mechanically raised a semitone at will. The dital or key, on being depressed, acts upon a stop-ring or eye, which draws the string down against the fret, and thus shortens its effective length. The fingers then stop the strings as usual over the remaining frets. A further improvement was patented in 1816 as the British harp lute. Other attempts possessing less practical merit than the dital harp were the lyra-guitarre, which appeared in Germany, at the beginning of the 19th century; the accord-guitarre, towards the middle of the same century; and the keyed guitar.[1]

gollark: > Maybe you've never thought about this, but if there are 100 devs working for free you'd only need to hire 50 devs to compromise all their code.That's, um, still quite a lot given the large amounts of developers involved, and code review exists, and this kind of conspiracy could *never* stay secret for very long, and if you have an obvious backdoor obvious people are fairly likely to look at it and notice.
gollark: Those are increasingly not working because of better security in stuff, which is probably good.
gollark: There is actually a wikipedia page for that.
gollark: I mean, I got a letter back from some government official, having sent an *email* the week before, which was only tangentially related to what I actually said.
gollark: Well, I complained to my local MP about the UK government complaining about end-to-end encryption, and they basically ignored me.

See also

Notes
  1. Schlesinger 1911, p. 15.

References
  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Schlesinger, Kathleen (1911). "Harp-lute". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 15.

Further reading
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