The metronome: a patent dispute, a deaf composer, and 200 years of arguing about tempo

Who built it, and who owned it

The metronome's mechanism was invented by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, an Amsterdam mechanic, who deposited a working model in November 1814. Johann Nepomuk Maelzel saw it, tried to buy the rights, was refused, and copied it — adding a numbered tempo scale and patenting it under his own name in England in December 1815. Beethoven began publishing metronome marks in 1817, and scholars still argue over whether his tempi are impossibly fast.

It is tempting to file all this under "who invented the metronome", which is the wrong question. The mechanism and the business separated almost immediately and never came back together. What follows is a story about the distance between those two things — and about a device that was sold as the end of arguments about tempo and instead began the longest one in music.

Before the box: a ruler, a wrist, and words that meant a feeling

Tempo was a problem long before anyone solved it, and the attempted solutions tell you what musicians actually wanted.

The earliest calibrated attempt we know of is Étienne Loulié's chronomètre of 1696: an adjustable pendulum mounted against a marked ruler. It had no escapement and made no sound. You set it, released it, and then watched it swing — a silent baton on a stand, competing for your attention with the score in front of you. It never took hold, and by Quantz's day it had faded into obscurity. Anyone who has tried to read music while watching a conductor they cannot quite see will understand why.

Johann Joachim Quantz took the opposite approach in his 1752 flute treatise, the Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen. Rather than building a machine, he pointed at the machine already in the room. In Chapter XVII he proposes the pulse of a healthy person — roughly eighty beats per minute — as the reference against which Allegro, Tempo ordinario, Adagio and their subdivisions should be measured. It is a startlingly practical idea. Everyone has a wrist. Nobody has to wind it.

And it maps onto how the Italian tempo words were actually used, which was as descriptions of character rather than speed. Allegro meant cheerful before it meant fast. Grave meant serious. The words told a player what kind of music this was, and the speed followed from the kind — mediated by the room, the instrument, the acoustic and the occasion. That flexibility was a feature, right up until publishers started shipping music to musicians the composer would never meet.

Quantz's instinct — that tempo is something a body already knows before it is something a device enforces — did not die with him. It is the founding premise of Dalcroze Eurhythmics, the approach developed by the Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in the early twentieth century, which teaches rhythm and musicality through physical movement before, and alongside, notation. Students walk a pulse, step a subdivision, and feel a metre in the body rather than counting it in the head. More than a century on, it remains in wide use in classrooms and conservatoires.

There is a real pedagogical argument buried in the contrast. A metronome tells a player that they are wrong without telling them where, which is not much use to someone who cannot yet hold a steady four. A pulse you generate yourself — a walking pace, a counted wrist — gives you something to be steady against from the inside. The click is a referee, and a referee is only useful once there is something to referee. If you want the same principle applied to pitch rather than time, it is the argument behind ear training from zero as well.

Amsterdam, 1814: the mechanism and the man who patented it

The engineering problem with a pendulum metronome is slow tempi. A simple pendulum's period depends on its length, and the arithmetic is unforgiving: to tick at around 40 beats per minute, a plain pendulum needs to be well over two metres long. You cannot put that on a piano.

Winkel's solution was elegant. He built a double — effectively inverted — pendulum, with weight on both sides of the pivot. Loading the rod below the pivot slows the swing without lengthening it, so a rod the height of a shoebox can behave like one the height of a room. That single idea is what makes a desktop metronome possible at all. He deposited a model with the Hollandsch Instituut van Wetenschappen, Letterkunde en Schoone Kunsten in Amsterdam on 27 November 1814, and the Institute described and commended the design in its report of 14 August 1815.

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel was in Amsterdam and saw it. Maelzel was not primarily a scientist; he was an exhibitor, a man in the business of astonishing paying audiences, and the owner of the notorious chess-playing automaton known as the Turk — a machine whose entire reputation rested on a concealed human operator. He understood, better than almost anyone alive, the difference between a thing and a thing that sells.

He offered to buy the rights, was refused, and built his own version anyway. To Winkel's mechanism he added one thing: a graduated, numbered scale, so that a tempo could be written down as a figure. Then he patented it in England on 5 December 1815 under the title "Instrument or Machine for the Improvement of all Musical Performance, called Metronome", secured a French patent in 1816, and began manufacturing in Paris that year.

The contemporary verdict on this was not kind, and it survives in print. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica states that the invention is "generally, but falsely, ascribed to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel", and records the inquiry's finding that the graduated scale "was the only point in which the instrument of Maelzel differed from" Winkel's.

Two things are worth being careful about here. First, this was not litigation. There was no courtroom, no verdict, no patent struck down — it was a scientific body's report and a public argument, and Maelzel kept both his patents and his factory. Second, the added scale was not nothing. Numbering the thing is precisely what turned a curiosity into a notation system: without a scale you have a ticking box, and with one you have a figure a composer can print above a stave in Vienna and a player can reproduce in Lisbon.

But the credit did not split proportionally. It went entirely one way. Winkel died in Amsterdam on 28 September 1826 holding an institutional finding in his favour and almost none of the recognition or the trade. Maelzel's initials went onto the marking itself — the MM in "MM ♩= 120" stands for Maelzel's Metronome — and stayed there for two centuries.

If that pattern sounds familiar, it should. Priority and ownership are different competitions, judged by different bodies, on different evidence, and the second one is the one that names the thing. It is the reason the 1983 MIDI agreement looks so unusual by comparison: a group of rivals deliberately declining to own the standard they had all helped build.

What is actually inside the pyramid

The mechanism has barely changed, which is its own kind of endorsement.

A wound mainspring stores energy. A clockwork escapement releases that energy in small, regular increments to keep the double pendulum swinging against friction, and each swing throws the escapement, producing the tick. The pyramid case is simply the shape that follows the contents: wide at the base where the spring barrel and gear train sit, narrowing towards the top where the rod needs only a slot to swing in.

Tempo is set by sliding the upper weight along the graduated rod, and this is the part every student gets backwards at least once. Sliding the weight up, away from the pivot, makes the swing slower. Sliding it down makes it faster. It feels wrong — the number goes up as the weight goes down — until you think about the counterweight underneath doing the opposing work. Modern Wittner pyramid metronomes use a pin-pallet escapement and typically cover roughly 40 to 208 beats per minute, which is essentially the same operating envelope Maelzel's Paris workshop was selling.

Beethoven commits a number to print

Beethoven was an early and loud convert. In a statement published in the Wiener Vaterländische Blätter on 13 October 1813, he described the metronome as "a welcome means of assuring the performance of my compositions everywhere in the tempi conceived by me, which to my regret have so often been misunderstood." That last clause is the whole motive. He was not enthusing about a gadget; he was complaining about performances he could not attend.

His first written metronome mark is generally cited in his corrected copy of the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick, Op. 112, from December 1815. Then, in 1817, the Leipziger Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung published Maelzel-metronome markings supplied by Beethoven for his first eight symphonies, followed shortly by markings for a run of string quartets — Op. 18 nos. 1–6, Op. 59 nos. 1–3, Op. 74 and Op. 95. That made him one of the first major composers to fix his own tempi in print as numbers.

There is a coincidence in the biography worth naming without overreading. The composer doing the most to make tempo portable and unambiguous was, by 1817, a man whose hearing had been deteriorating for the better part of two decades. It is a genuinely striking pairing. It is not a causal claim: his public endorsement came in 1813, by which point the hearing loss was already well established, and there is no evidence he took up the metronome because of it. Readers curious about that side of his life should read our separate piece on what Beethoven's hearing loss actually was, which is a more complicated story than the popular version.

Two centuries of arguing about whether he got it wrong

Here is where the history stops being settled.

A great many of Beethoven's markings strike modern musicians as very fast. The most-cited figure comes from a 2013 paper by Sture Forsén, Harry B. Gray, L. K. Olof Lindgren and Shirley B. Gray in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society: 66 of the 135 surviving markings have been judged by musicians and scholars as absurdly fast and thus possibly wrong. Their proposed explanation is mechanical. If Beethoven's metronome had been dropped or damaged — its fixed lower weight knocked out of position — the scale would read systematically wrong, and a composer trusting the instrument would print wrong numbers in good faith.

A very different kind of study reached a different conclusion. In December 2020, Almudena Martin-Castro and Iñaki Ucar published "Conductors' tempo choices shed light over Beethoven's metronome" in PLOS ONE. They ran an automated tempo-extraction algorithm over 36 complete recorded symphony cycles spanning the 1940s to the 2010s, and separately built a mathematical model of a Maelzel metronome from period photographs and patent material. What they found was a systematic, near-uniform gap between Beethoven's numbers and what conductors actually do: broadly Romantic interpreters averaging around 13 bpm below the marking, historically-informed conductors around 6 to 8 bpm below. Their argument is that the near-uniformity of the offset points away from a broken instrument and towards a reading error — that Beethoven took the number from below the sliding weight rather than above it. User error, not hardware failure.

These are not two versions of the same claim. One is a historical-mechanical hypothesis; the other is a statistical and computational inference from performance data. They are testing different things and they disagree, and both are published in serious venues. That is what an open question looks like.

And then there is the fact that spoils both. The finales of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies are, in ordinary performance practice, routinely taken faster than Beethoven marked them — the exact opposite of the usual complaint. Any theory that says his numbers were uniformly too high has to explain why some of the most famous movements in the repertoire are habitually played above the number rather than below it. No single tidy fix survives contact with all 135 markings.

You will also encounter the "double-beat" or whole-beat reinterpretation, associated with Wim Winters, which proposes that a metronome tick should be read as a half-beat and that Beethoven's tempi should therefore be roughly halved. It should be flagged plainly: this is a minority position outside mainstream musicology, and it does not carry the same evidentiary standing as the peer-reviewed work above. It is worth knowing the argument exists, mostly so you can recognise it when it turns up in a comments section.

The musicians who refused

The interesting thing is that scepticism about the metronome is as old as the metronome, and it came from inside the house.

Beethoven himself hedged. In the manuscript of the song Nord oder Süd (1817), he wrote a figure and then immediately qualified it: 100 according to Maelzel, "but this must be held applicable to only the first measures, for feeling also has its tempo and this cannot entirely be expressed in this figure." That is the device's most prominent advocate telling you the number is a starting point, not a specification.

(You will also see a much blunter anti-metronome line attributed to Beethoven — that those with right feeling do not need one. It reaches us via Anton Schindler, a biographer known to have altered and invented source material, and Beethoven scholars treat anything resting on him alone with considerable suspicion. Treat it as doubtful rather than documentary.)

Later composers were less equivocal. Brahms, writing to Georg Henschel in February 1880 about the German Requiem, said the metronome was of no value to him: "I myself have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go well together." Liszt put it to Siegmund Lebert on 10 January 1870 that "a metronomical performance is certainly tiresome and nonsensical; time and rhythm must be adapted to and identified with the melody, the harmony, the accent and the poetry." Berlioz warned in similar terms against playing that hardens into an icy frigidity.

None of this is a historical curiosity. It is the same argument that happens in rehearsal rooms every week — click track or no click track, grid or feel, whether locking to a number produces accuracy or produces something accurate and dead. Two hundred years in, we have not settled it, and I am not sure we should want to.

From clockwork to a buzz on the wrist

The hardware kept moving even while the argument stood still.

The Connecticut clockmaker Seth Thomas, whose company dates from 1813, sold metronomes through the nineteenth century — initially rebadging units made by the French manufacturer Philippe-Nicolas Paquet before manufacturing its own from 1887. Its 1950s pyramids sat on conservatory practice-room walls for decades. The German firm Wittner, founded by Gustav Wittner in 1885, still makes wooden pyramid metronomes today and is described as the largest current manufacturer of the mechanical type. That is a product line older than recorded sound, still in production.

From roughly the late 1930s, synchronous-motor electric metronomes — the same principle as an electric clock — began displacing spring and escapement, with the American firm Franz a mainstay of that transitional type through to the 1990s. Battery-powered quartz-crystal metronomes arrived in the 1980s, using the same technology as a quartz wristwatch: no winding, no level surface, accurate in any orientation. Wittner, Seiko and Franz all built them. Then the click moved into software, and onto every phone.

Somewhere in there, the metronome stopped being only a tempo device and became a record. Every practice app that logs the tempo you worked at is a descendant of Maelzel's graduated scale — the same two-hundred-year project of pinning musical time to a number you can write down, compare and return to. Crescender's practice tracking sits squarely downstream of that, and so, in a lower-tech way, does keeping a practice journal.

The genuinely new idea is more recent, and it is not a smaller box. The wearable vibrating metronome — the Soundbrenner Pulse, launched in 2015 — delivers the beat as a tactile pulse through a wristband instead of a sound. It was built for drummers and loud-ensemble players who simply cannot hear a click over the band, which is a real and daily problem in the same category as everything covered in hearing loss in working musicians. But it also means the beat can now reach a deaf or hard-of-hearing player directly, through the skin.

Which is a strange place for this to have arrived. Winkel's whole achievement was making a compact thing that could tick. Maelzel's was making the tick countable. Two centuries of argument later, the most interesting new metronome is the one that has taken the sound back out — closer, in a way, to Loulié's silent ruler than to anything Maelzel sold. Whether that changes how anyone argues about tempo is another matter entirely.

Common questions

Who really invented the metronome, Winkel or Maelzel?
Winkel invented the mechanism. Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, working in Amsterdam, built the double pendulum that made a compact tempo device possible and deposited a model in November 1814. Johann Maelzel added a numbered scale and patented the result under his own name in England in December 1815. The 1911 Britannica flatly calls the attribution to Maelzel false.

Were Beethoven's metronome markings actually too fast?
Unresolved. A 2013 paper in the Notices of the AMS notes that 66 of his 135 surviving markings have been judged absurdly fast, and proposes a damaged metronome. A 2020 PLOS ONE study of 36 recorded symphony cycles instead concludes he probably misread his own instrument's scale. Neither explanation fits every marking.

How does a mechanical pyramid metronome work?
A wound spring drives a clockwork escapement that releases energy in small, even increments to keep a double pendulum swinging, producing one tick per swing. Sliding the adjustable weight up the graduated rod, away from the pivot, slows the tempo; sliding it down speeds it up. Wittner pyramid models typically cover about 40 to 208 beats per minute.

How did musicians keep tempo before the metronome existed?
By feel, by convention, and by the body. Johann Joachim Quantz's 1752 flute treatise recommends using a healthy person's pulse — around eighty beats per minute — as the reference against which Allegro, Adagio and the rest are measured. Étienne Loulié's 1696 chronomètre offered a silent calibrated pendulum, but it never caught on.

Why did some famous composers refuse to use the metronome?
Because they thought fixed numbers falsified musical time. Brahms told Georg Henschel in 1880 that his blood and a mechanical instrument did not go well together. Liszt wrote to Siegmund Lebert in 1870 that metronomical performance is tiresome and nonsensical. Even Beethoven, its early champion, noted that feeling has its own tempo.

When did metronomes become electronic and then digital?
Synchronous-motor electric metronomes began replacing clockwork from around the late 1930s, with Franz a leading maker into the 1990s. Battery-powered quartz-crystal models arrived in the 1980s from Wittner, Seiko and Franz, running accurately in any position. Software and phone metronomes followed, and wearable vibrating metronomes appeared from 2015.