It is not plain exactly when Cristofori first built a piano. An inventory made by his employers, the Medici family, indicates the existence of a piano by the year 1700; another document of doubtful authenticity indicates a date of 1698. The three Cristofori pianos that survive today date Piano Lessons from the 1720s.

They are informally called birdcage pianos because of their prominent damper mechanism. Pianinos were distinguished from the oblique, or diagonally strung upright unnatural in vogue in France by Roller & Blanchet during the overdue 1820s. The dwarfish spinet upright was manufactured from the mid-1930s until recent times. The low scene of the hammers mandatory the appliance of a "drop action" to preserve a reasonable keyboard height.