A physicist’s patents and a London factory.

Wheatstone is the first and oldest surviving name in concertinas, and it belonged, unusually, to a celebrated scientist. Charles Wheatstone — remembered today for the Wheatstone bridge and the electric telegraph — took out British Patent No. 5803 in 1829 for “Improvements in the Construction of Wind Musical Instruments,” covering the symphonium, and Patent No. 10041 in 1844 for “Improvements in the Action of the Concertina, &c. by Vibrating Springs.” The reference site concertina.com calls the 1844 patent “The most important of the concertina patents, establishing the characteristic features of the English concertina”: 48 keys, with the notes alternating between the hands.

The firm, C. Wheatstone & Co., was already making concertinas by around 1829, fifteen years before the definitive patent, concertina.com says, so we avoid saying it was “invented” in 1844. The factory moved within London — Conduit Street, then Duncan Terrace in Islington — and its records survive: twelve factory ledgers from 1834 to 1891, now at the Horniman Museum.

Those ledgers show the trade’s family tree. They “chart the weekly wages paid to employees such as Messrs Lachenal, Dove, Chidley and Nickolds, all of whom later left the Wheatstone factory to set up their own concertina workshops, in competition with the parent company,” the Horniman’s Margaret Birley writes. Lachenal and the Crabb brothers both learned there.

Boosey & Hawkes, then Steve Dickinson.

The name changed hands in the twentieth century. By the early 1960s the business was part of Boosey & Hawkes — one source dates the start of that ownership to 1959 — and the Horniman’s catalogue says the Duncan Terrace premises were sold in 1961 and production moved to the Boosey & Hawkes factory in Edgware, under Sid Watkins. Later ledgers, covering 1910 to 1974, were lent to the Horniman by the man who owns the name today.

That man is Steve Dickinson, a concertina maker who in 1975 bought the name and what remained of the business — name, machinery and stock — and trades as C. Wheatstone & Co. Sources say he restarted the serial numbers at 60000. The workshop is in Stowmarket, Suffolk, according to the folk-music charity EATMT. The name was bought outright, not licensed, so the brand and its present maker are one and the same.

The name is still working. In 2025–26 the English maker Wolverton Concertinas described a new Wheatstone Aeola build made “in collaboration with Steve Dickinson who owns C.Wheatstone and Co.” Boosey & Hawkes no longer owns it.

Patents, ledgers and three systems.

Much of what we know about the London trade comes from one firm’s books. In 1996 the Horniman Museum in London bought “almost all the contents of the Concertina Museum in Belper, Derbyshire,” more than six hundred free-reed instruments, its keeper of musical instruments, Margaret Birley, writes. “Among the highlights are twelve ledgers from the C. Wheatstone & Co. concertina factory dating from 1834 to 1891,” saved from destruction by a manager, Henry Minting. The ledgers “chart the weekly wages paid to employees such as Messrs Lachenal, Dove, Chidley and Nickolds, all of whom later left the Wheatstone factory to set up their own concertina workshops, in competition with the parent company.”

There are three main systems. The International Concertina Association explains that on the English concertina “Each button plays one note – the same whether pulling or pushing the button,” while “Anglos are bisonoric: each button sounds two different notes, depending on whether the bellows are compressed (pushed) or opened (pulled),” and duets play the same note in both directions with higher notes on the right. The Anglo, it says, “is popular for Irish traditional music and for Morris and other traditional dance forms”; the historian Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin writes that “the Anglo-German concertina arrived in Clare during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.” Wheatstone’s 1844 patent defined the English system; the Anglo was developed by others.

The ledgers also give individual histories. One entry, the Horniman notes, records the sale of concertina No. 1161 on 12 September 1846. The museum calls the full set of seventeen notebooks a record of the factory’s output “from 1834 to 1974 — albeit with some gaps.”

Lachenal, founded under his own name in 1858 by a Swiss former Wheatstone employee, made by one estimate about 250,000 instruments before closing in the 1930s. Crabb, the Islington family firm founded by another Wheatstone employee, traded from 1860 until its shop closed in 1989.

Among modern makers, Colin Dipper has restored and made concertinas in Wiltshire since the mid-1960s, Jürgen Suttner in Siegen says he has made about 1,100, and The Button Box in Massachusetts made R. Morse & Co. concertinas from 1999 until about 2022.

Jeffries, the Praed Street family firm, left no price list, brochure or advertisement that anyone has found, yet modern makers still cite its Anglos as their models. A later patent, No. 2289 of 1861, was taken out by William Wheatstone, not Charles. The Science Museum in London holds an early Wheatstone instrument inscribed “patented 19 December 1829, No 5803,” and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds a Wheatstone concertina dated 1831–37.

A scientist’s name on a squeezebox.

Wheatstone’s brand is unusual: the surname of a celebrated Victorian scientist, attached to a folk and parlour instrument. The scientific association gives the name authority; the concertina gives it warmth. Its present owner, a working maker, has kept both. The company name, C. Wheatstone & Co., has survived its changes of owner since the nineteenth century — the founder’s initial, his surname and the “& Co.” of a Victorian partnership — and that unbroken form is the brand’s strongest asset.

For a design guide, Wheatstone shows how a heritage name can be bought, kept and revived by one craftsman, and how surviving records — patents, ledgers, museum pieces — give a revived name its authority. Compare Lachenal, a former employee’s name that closed in the 1930s, and Dipper, a modern maker.

For this guide we use a navy and a parchment with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument, label or mark is reproduced.

Keep Wheatstone’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.