Louis Lot (1807-96)

Louis Lot became official supplier of flutes to the Paris Conservatoire on Louis Dorus's appointment as flute professor in 1860. So his name is attached to the typical silver cylindrical Boehm flute that became standard equipment for players of the French Flute School for the next hundred years.

Lot and his partner Vincent Hypolite Godfroy made the first French commercial model of Boehm's ring-key flute in 1837, and ten years later the firm purchased the right to make Boehm's cylinder flute of 1847 in France. Apart from Boehm's own workshop in Munich, the only other licensed maker was the London firm of Rudall & Rose, later Rudall, Carte & Co. Alfred G. Badger of New York, who had made ring-key flutes from about 1844, also made unlicensed Boehm-system cylinder flutes after 1847, as no patent protected the invention in the United States.

At the Paris exhibition of 1867 Louis Lot presented a new design having a thicker tube, larger toneholes and a bigger, more square embouchure, together with a sturdier mechanism in which the modern 'independent' closed G# key replaced the Dorus G#.

In 1887 Charles Molé brought the first silver Louis Lot B-foot flute (No. 4358, 1887) to the Boston Symphony orchestra the first of a long succession of French Conservatoire graduates who nearly all played Louis Lot flutes. Thus when George Winfield Haynes (1866-1947) and his brother William Sherman Haynes (1864-1939) set up a flute making and repair shop in Boston they copied the Louis Lot flutes played by Boston professionals as well as Boehm & Mendler designs. The Haynes company established the silver Lot-pattern flute as the standard professional instrument, to be followed by other manufacturers including Verne Q. Powell and the numerous band instrument manufacturers in Elkhart, Ind. in the early 20th century.