Gustave Lyon (19 November 1857 – 12 January 1936) was a French piano maker, acoustician and inventor. He was head of Pleyel et Cie from 1887.

Life

Lyon was born in Paris in 1857, son of Jacob Lyon, a singing teacher, and his wife Fanny ''née'' Coche. He was educated at the Lycée Saint-Louis and at the École polytechnique; he received a degree in civil engineering from the École des mines de Paris in 1882."Lyon, Gustave (1857–1936)"
Centre d'Archives d'Architecture Contemporaine. Retrieved 15 July 2023.
Published in ''Bulletin de l'Association des Anciens élèves de l'Ecole des Mines de Paris'', 1936–2. Retrieved from archive 15 July 2023. Auguste Wolff, director of the piano maker Pleyel et Cie, offered him a place in the company. Lyon later married Wolff's daughter Marie, and he took over as head of the company on Wolff's death in 1887. He filed a number of inventions for new kinds of piano, such as a double pianos and a two-keyboard piano; and other instruments, such as a

chromatic harp Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are used to characterize Scale (music), scales. The terms are also applied to musical instruments, Interval (music), intervals, Chord (music), chords, Musical note, notes, musical styles, ...

and chromatic

timpani Timpani (; ) or kettledrums (also informally called timps) are musical instruments in the percussion instrument, percussion family. A type of drum categorised as a hemispherical drum, they consist of a Membranophone, membrane called a drumhead, ...

. In the First World War, although not obliged to take part, Lyon was commander of artillery on the east coast of the Cotentin Peninsula; later, as deputy to the director of land artillery, he organised the defence of Cherbourg against aircraft. During this time he invented instruments for locating aircraft, and studied ballistics. He was interested in

acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician ...

: his improvements to the acoustics of the

Palais du Trocadéro Palais () may refer to: * Dance hall, popularly a ''palais de danse'', in the 1950s and 1960s in the UK * ''Palais'', French for palace **Grand Palais, the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées **Petit Palais, an art museum in Paris * Palais River in t ...

(1903–1911) established his reputation in the field after the war. He was one of the designers of the Salle Pleyel. He improved existing concert halls and advised the architects of new buildings; he was an adviser to

Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , ; ), was a Swiss-French architectural designer, painter, urban planner and writer, who was one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture ...

. He also helped to preserve important buildings which had been condemned for their poor acoustics. Lyon was made

Commander of the Legion of Honour The National Order of the Legion of Honour ( ), formerly the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour (), is the highest and most prestigious French national order of merit, both military and civil. Currently consisting of five classes, it was ...

in 1928. He died in Paris in 1936.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Lyon, Gustave 1857 births 1936 deaths École Polytechnique alumni Businesspeople from Paris Piano makers Acousticians 19th-century French inventors 20th-century French inventors Commanders of the Legion of Honour Pleyel et Cie people