MANUFACTURING: Swing & Upswing

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Last week the Wurlitzers, piano makers for 30 years, announced a 129% sales increase over the first five months of 1938, an all time record since neat German-born Rudolph Wurlitzer founded the company in 1856. Meanwhile, piano makers as a whole&#hardest-hit U. S. music industrialists during Depression—recorded a 30.5% sales increase over last year.

Strongest single stimulant to this lately moribund business is large-scale production of compact, streamlined pianos adapted in size and style to modern apartments and retailing at about $225 up, some $100 less than the old units. No. i innovation are Wurlitzer consoles finished in "Kordevon," a cloth covered with ten coats of the plastic, pyroxylin.

For this, its third sales peak period, the industry can also thank the music popularizers who lurk behind every microphone, in every film studio. First peak (365,000 sales) came in 1909, when most cultured U. S. families boasted a piano and tinkling was part of gentle breeding; second peak (343,000) in 1923, when 55% of sales were player pianos. When the industry created a taste for mechanical music, it bred the germ of its own decline. Player-piano addicts soon shifted to radios. Seven lean years and near-death followed. But meantime, radio, once the piano's ruin, gradually wakened a new public love of music. Today, piano makers are enjoying a third peak: and 5,865,000 U. S. families own pianos.