Louis Lot (1807-96)
Louis Lot became official supplier of flutes to the
Paris Conservatoire on
Louis Dorus's appointment as flute professor in
1860. So his name is attached to the typical silver
cylindrical Boehm flute that became standard equipment
for players of the French
Flute School for the next hundred years.
Lot and his partner Vincent Hypolite Godfroy made the
first French commercial model of Boehm's
ring-key flute in 1837, and ten years later the firm
purchased the right to make Boehm's cylinder flute of
1847 in France. Apart from Boehm's own workshop in Munich,
the only other licensed maker was the London firm of
Rudall & Rose, later Rudall,
Carte & Co. Alfred G. Badger of New York, who had
made ring-key flutes from about 1844, also made unlicensed
Boehm-system cylinder flutes after 1847, as no patent
protected the invention in the United States.
At the Paris exhibition of 1867 Louis Lot presented
a new design having a thicker tube, larger toneholes
and a bigger, more square embouchure, together with
a sturdier mechanism in which the modern 'independent'
closed G# key replaced the Dorus G#.
In 1887 Charles Molé brought the first silver Louis
Lot B-foot flute (No. 4358, 1887) to the Boston Symphony
orchestra the first of a long succession of French Conservatoire
graduates who nearly all played Louis Lot flutes. Thus
when George Winfield Haynes (1866-1947) and his brother
William Sherman Haynes (1864-1939) set up a flute making
and repair shop in Boston they copied the Louis Lot
flutes played by Boston professionals as well as Boehm
& Mendler designs. The Haynes company established the
silver Lot-pattern flute as the standard professional
instrument, to be followed by other manufacturers including
Verne Q. Powell and the numerous band instrument manufacturers
in Elkhart, Ind. in the early 20th century.
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