Gottfried Silbermann (January 14, 1683 – August 4, 1753) was a German builder of keyboard instruments. He built harpsichords, clavichords, organs, and fortepianos; his modern reputation rests mainly on the latter two.
How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think. Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile (1937)
[Gottfried Silbermann] returned to Saxony as a master craftsman in 1710, and opened his own organ workshop in Freiberg one year later.
During the 1740s, King Frederick the Great of Prussia became acquainted with Silbermann’s pianos and bought a number of them (the early-19th-century musicologist Johann Nikolaus Forkel claims this number was 15, though Stewart Pollens believes this to be “certainly exaggerated”).