It should be quite obvious to even the most casual visitor to this site that I am very interested in the harmonica and other mouth blown free reed instruments, as well as music-related intellectual property. However, I am also interested in lamellophones, or plucked idiophones, especially the African family of instruments generally called kalimba or mbira, often rather inaccurately known by the English term thumb piano. So I was intrigued when I stumbled across US patent 1763518 some time ago. It was granted in 1930 to Stephen Haweis and was simply titled "Musical Instrument". As you can see from the diagrams above, his invention looks very much like a kalimba, particularly the style commonly associated with the Great Lakes region of Africa. For example, here is an illustration from James Hingston Tuckey's account of his 1816 expedition to explore the Congo River, then known as the Zaire:
So how did Stephen Haweis come up with such a similar idea? Fortunately, his extensive travels are well documented, as he was quite a well known artist. In 1927 he applied for this, his only patent, while he was living in Washington D.C. He had been living there since returning from a trip to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) the previous year, serving as artist to the Smithsonian-Chrysler expedition headed by Dr. William M. Mann, then director of the National Zoological Park in D.C. His patent makes no mention of any African influence, or indeed any prior art at all, simply claiming it to be "an instrument of novel character which is adapted to be played by the fingers or thumbs of the operator to produce clear, pleasing, musical tones." I shall let you, dear reader, draw your own conclusions.
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