A standard piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. But who decided this number would be the norm. Before the piano was invented, composers wrote a lot of music for the harpsichord, which has just 60 keys. This meant that everything they wrote was limited to the harpsichord’s five-octave range.

Then, the first piano was invented. Around the year 1700, Bartolomeo Cristofori, a musical instrument technician from Padua, Italy, decided it was time to update the harpsichord – and he came up with a new keyboard instrument with a hammer mechanism. Cristofori was hired by the Florentine court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1688 to look after their harpsichords and, eventually, other instruments.

A 1700 inventory of Medici instruments mentions an ‘arpicimbalo’ (lit. an instrument resembling a harpsichord) invented by Cristofori. The instrument had a brand-new hammer and damper mechanism, two keyboards and a range of four octaves (49 keys). After word got out of Cristofori’s miraculous musical invention, composers started writing more and more music for the piano.

But the instrument’s four-octave range was limiting. So, piano manufacturers designed new pianos with more keys, so that composers like Haydn and Mozart could write more challenging material for a fuller keyboard.

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