The elderly man spoke, "I manufactured the best musical instruments in the world. We made trombones, trumpets, clarinets, and saxophones. There was a special problem with some of the metal horns. In the lower sound range, the pitch was accurate, but when playing up an octave, the sound was off about a quarter of a pitch. In order to make the pitch true it was necessary for the musicians to use their lips and their lips would get tired.”
The old man continued, “Making an instrument was not a one man job. Different parts of each instrument were made in different rooms by different people. Finally each instrument was assembled, then it was tested. One day a man who did the testing came to my office. He carried a horn that played true in the high range without needing to make the tone bend with his lips. He was very excited because it was the first time this had ever happened. I instructed him not to tell anybody about it. Then I interviewed each of the persons who had worked on the manufacture of the instrument.”
“The bell is the large opening of a horn where the sound comes out. There was a man who was in charge of tempering the metal of the bell. He told me he had made a mistake when he tempered the bell of the instrument. I asked him to repeat the mistake on the next one he worked on. We had our answer. The horn stayed in tune on the high notes. It was a new way to temper instruments. We kept it a secret, and soon musicians from all over the world were buying my horns at a premium price, and our business grew.”
Several days passed before the old man spoke again about making horns. He said, “One day a young man came to me with the mouth-piece from his trumpet. He was a jazz musician who was very good playing low notes, but he found it difficult to hit the high ones. His ambition was to play the high “C” with ease. This was a feat trumpet players only dreamed of in those days. He asked me if there was anything I might do to improve his mouth-piece so he could play higher. I looked at his lips, and I looked at the mouth-piece for his trumpet. It had an opening shaped like a deep funnel with a relatively thin rim for the lips to press against. I told him to come back in a week, and I would have a better mouth-piece more suited to his special lips.”
“When the trumpet player returned I showed him the new part I had invented for him. It was made thick and heavy with a very shallow depression leading to a much smaller hole to blow though. He attached the new metal mouthpiece to his trumpet and began to play. A huge smile came to his face as he played higher than he had ever thought possible. He blew the high “C” several times. He was so thrilled that he went into each room of my plant and played music for my employees. In later years they heard the sound of his trumpet on radio, movies, and finally on television. The trumpet player became well known by his jazz contemporaries as Satchmo. Now music students in our universities study him by his real name Louis Armstrong."