
Re-post about this old Irish piano company. Sometimes I lose my mind and delete things that I think are cool. As I understand it, the pianos made at the Shannon factory are named Lindner, a subsidiary of Rippen.
So to re-cap.
In the 1960s Ireland had lots of unemployed, and the Irish government was looking for investments in order to create more jobs. Therefore they published a bill in which they declared that in Shannon, a small city nearby the local airport, foreign companies could achieve quite substantial tax reductions, if only this would led to a certain amount of jobs.
Rippen already was selling pianos in the USA, using the Thomas organ connection. But pianos are heavy, so shipment had to be done by boat, which made it necessary to take care of sea-packaging, and so on.
They had a brain-storm: if they could make a lightweight piano they could ship it by air. And if they produced it at Shannon the investment would be low and for a nice number of years the tax reductions would be profitable.
So they started the development of the "plastic piano". They used a frame of aluminium tubes welded together, and they replaced as much as possible of the wooden parts by plastic, and ended up with an instru- ment of only 75 kilos [165 pounds]. Since the keyboard could be turned downwards inside the chest, as in all Rippen pianos, they were able to ship two pianos almost in the space normally used by one. And they could send them everywhere, as long as an airplane could land.
The production of the Lindner piano began with founding a factory at Shannon, Ireland. Only the plastic parts were produced at Shannon; the normal parts were purchased from external suppliers, and Renner even developed a special mechanism. The main factory at Ede in the Netherlands supplied some parts as well.
Thank you