- The United States President Ulysses S. Grant declares Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition open. An orchestra of 150 performers and a chorus of nearly a thousand singers, conducted by Theodore Thomas, perform G.F. Handel’s “Hallelujah”.
- The Centennial Exhibition catalogue lists pianos as “Instruments of Precision, Research, Experiment and Illustration, including Telegraphy and Music, Group XXV, Class 327, Piano-fortes.”
- Steinway & Sons ships 9 crates of the total weight of 8,000 pounds to the Centennial Exhibition (as recorded by the Pennsylvania Railway).
- Centennial Exhibition is the first exhibition in nine years where Steinway & Sons present their pianos to a jury.
- Arthur von Holwede, Steinway & Sons’ chief tuner, and the team of his subordinates, have worked for many months to prepare Steinway & Sons pianos for the exhibition.
- Pianist Friedrich Boscovitz, hired by William Steinway, begins to demonstrate Steinway & Sons pianos at the Exhibition (and will continue to do so throughout its duration).
- Among Steinway & Sons’ competitors at the Centennial Exhibition are some of the most notable old and new piano manufacturers in the United States: Chickering & Sons, Decker Brothers, George Steck & Company and, most importantly, Albert Weber. The exhibition includes over two hundred pianos, of which 96 are competing.
- This is probably the most crucial exhibition in the history of Steinway & Sons. Anything other than the highest award (that is, a possibility of being officially regarded as inferior in quality to much cheaper pianos produced by a competitor) would be the end of Steinway & Sons, forcing the market wide open for cheap pianos that would bear the trademarks of Chickering and Weber, but in fact would be conveyor-made at Joseph P.Hale’s factory, and forcing Steinway & Sons to switch to C.F. Theodor’s strategy of making large numbers of cheap pianos, thus undermining Steinway & Sons unique identity on the pianoforte market.
- To make matters more complex and dramatic, the Centennial Exhibition uses a non-standard judging and award system that seems designed to promote corruption among the judges and competitors alike. There are no gold, silver or bronze medals; there’s only one type of medal, gold – but it’s accompanied by a report, written and signed by one of several judges of a given category of products, and confirmed by the rest of the judges, reviewing products in the same category. Professor J.C. Watson of the University of Michigan has composed the detailed instructions on judging. In the words of F.A. Walker, the secretary of the Centennial Committee: “The radical defect of the medal system is that it conveys no practical information. It merely signifies that an articles is good; but it does not answer the question which Socrates was wont to confound his adversaries with: Good for what? The report tells what it is good for, where good, and how good… In other words, the report is the real award.”
- There are four pianoforte judges employed by the Centennial Exhibition: General Henry K. Oliver, an amateur musician and a lifelong friend of the Chickering family; George F. Bristow, a composer and musical pedagogue from Brooklyn, endorser of Albert Weber pianos in newspaper advertisements; Julius Schiedmayer, a pianomaker from Stuttgart, Germany, personal friend of C.F. Theodor Steinweg, instrumental in motivating the jury to issue the famous regretful statement about the absence of Steinway & Sons pianos at the Vienna Exposition in 1873; and F.P. Kupka, from Vienna, an amateur musician, rumored to be easy to bribe. Oliver and Bristow have been paid $600 stipend by Centennial Committee, whereas Schiedmayer and Kupka have each received $1,000, as foreigners. Rumors begin to circulate that Steinways in some way used their influence to install Julius Shiedmayer as the exhibition judge (the rumors are untrue: Julius Shiedmayer had been appointed by the German government without any possible influence by anyone from Steinway & Sons).