Thomastick-Infeld in strings history.
Two of the greatest innovations of the 20th century come from Thomastick-Infeld, a company based in Wien:
- in 1914 they patented a machine to use the flat wire for the winding of a string, before of that the winding wire was always round, sometimes polished by hand after the winding process
- just before 1980 they patented the first synthetic core string for bowed instruments (winded with a flat wire): the Dominant string. Keep in mind this date, we tend to forget it. We are so used now to synthetic strings with a flat wire that it is hard to remember they are out for only 40 years now...
Ps: when I play modern I love Dominant: all that aluminium gives me the feeling of the roaring 20s, and it is easy to find nice colors and a sound full of overtones with almost no vibrato at all.
