Mozart was the first great piano virtuoso (master). He also wrote the first piano duet in 1765.

When a leg of Margaret Truman’s grand piano broke through the floor of her room at the White House, her father knew it was time to move out. For the next four years, President Truman and his family lived elsewhere while the White House went through a top-to-bottom renovation.

In addition to inventing the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the "una corda" pedal (the soft pedal) in about 1726.

The piano stool that changes height when turned appeared by the end of the eighteenth century and can be considered an important landmark in the ergonomic design of furniture. If anything, it is too well adapted to children, who have always preferred spinning around on the stool to sitting on it to practice!

One of the earliest recordings of a piano performance was by Johannes Brahms playing one of his "Hungarian Dances."

Early pianos were made in small workshops where a single craftsman and a few assistants produced on a very small scale. Bartolomeo Cristofori was employed by a rich, music-loving prince, so he had the advantage of being able to build one piano after the next, adjusting his designs as he gained more experience. He was also able to train assistants, some of whom started their own workshops.

The first music for the piano was published in 1732.

In 1930, Koichi Kawai left his job at Yamaha to start his own piano building company.

In 1910, the US manufactured 360,000 pianos; Germany made 150,000; Britain made 75,000; and France made 25,000. This is considered to be the peak of the piano’s popularity.

As the piano evolved, English piano makers concentrated on a more powerful sound while the Germans concentrated on speed and subtlety in the responsiveness of their instruments, so the main differences between the pianos of the two countries was their actions.

Yamaha in Japan starting making upright pianos in 1900 and made its first grand in 1903.

An architect built an apartment building in New York in 1891 that had an upright piano built into every parlor.

On some of the pianos of the early 1800’s (both uprights and grands), there were as many as seven pedals, including a buzzing bassoon stop, a muting moderator, a thumping and jingling military stop, as well as the damper and una corde (soft) pedals.

The first classical record to sell 1 million copies was a performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1 by Van Cliburn, recorded in 1958.

The pianoforte made its concert debut in 1768.

The most prolific, versatile, and ingenious piano-inventor that ever lived was Jean-Henri Pape. He took out as many as 137 patents. His most useful ideas were the use of felt for covering piano hammers, and the device of cross-stringing the piano strings. He designed the "console" piano, a round piano, an elliptical piano, and a hexagonal piano. He also developed a piano that used springs instead of strings.

Clavichords and harpsichords first appeared in Europe at the beginning of the 15th century.

The first piano concert in New York was in 1773.