The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I have eighty-eight of something, and they are not all white.
My original name means soft-loud.
I hold two hundred strings under roughly twenty tons of tension.
Technically I am percussion — I strike things with hammers.
Chopin wrote for me, and so did Elton John.
Piano
Twenty tons of tension sit inside the case. That is why the frame is cast iron, and why a piano is furniture you cannot carry.
Bartolomeo Cristofori built the first one in Florence around 1700 and called it a harpsichord that plays soft and loud, because that was the entire point: the harpsichord plucked its strings and could not be played louder by pressing harder. His hammer action, which strikes and immediately falls away so the string can ring, is essentially the mechanism still used. The iron frame came a century later and changed everything, letting the strings be tightened to a tension no wooden case could survive, which is where the modern instrument's volume and its immovable weight both come from.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #21 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #20. Next: mystery #22. Or try #41, #42, #43, #44, #45, #46.