- To Steinways’ disappointment, at the London Exhibition the medal for best piano – “for excellence in every kind of piano power and quality of tone, precision of mechanism and solidity” – is awarded to the English manufacturer Broadwood. Steinway & Sons pianos, however, receive four “secondary” gold medals at the exhibition. The judges prize Steinway & Sons pianos for their “powerful, clear and brilliant tone, with excellent workmanship”. Even though Steinway & Sons has presented its revolutionary overstrung grand piano at the London Exhibition, the judges clearly have failed to recognize the invention’s importance, as can be seen from the opening paragraph of their report: “Although eleven years have passed since the last Exhibition, we have not to record the introduction of any very important novelty”. (Austrian pianomaker Johann Baptist Streicher, however, has instantly appreciated Steinway & Sons’ discoveries, and upon his return to Vienna, will begin to make copies of Steinway & Sons pianos.)
- London merchants Cramer, Beale & Wood buy the four medal-winning Steinway & Sons pianos, and become London representatives of the firm. Their collaboration with Steinway & Sons won’t be successful, and will last only a few months.
- News of the World (a London publication) reports that Steinway & Sons pianos are “without a doubt the musical gems of the Exhibition”. Presse Musicale (France) follows suit: “That firm, not known among the exhbitors at the first London Exhibition (1851), has taken in a very short time an astonishing development […] a square piano of Messrs. Steinway fully possesses the tone of a grand”. A correspondent for New York Times writes: “All the best players in London tried the pianos, and some of a burglarious disposition even went so far as to break the instruments open when they found them locked”.