The Bennett Scale - a partial archive
It is universally known that Wibb loved Louis Lot flutes, whether in silver or maillechort (nickel silver). This is made clear in the "Wibb" book, along with photographs of his earliest experiments. Other contemporaneous makers were added to the collection over time, including several Lebret flutes, but Wibb clearly accumulated dozens of Lots over the decades. In this partial archive, only the Lots are documented, so I necessarily have to focus on those here.
The problem Wibb had to deal with is nicely encapsulated in one paper in the archive, describing a very early Lot (quite possibly made by Lot himself): serial number 814 (click on thumbnail to see full size):
The terse decription provided (maybe not by Wibb himself) says simply: "Original LL scale: WIBB says 'awful!' ". We will also notice that all the main joint tone holes are the same size, 13.5 mm, except for the even smaller C hole. This was far from uncommon. Boehm made most of his flutes the same way (indeed, often using even smaller tone hole sizes), as did many Parisian atelier-based makers well into the twentieth century - I have two!), but it arguably fails to support modern demands for power and projection.
Nevertheless it is important to recognise the advantages of both closed hole keywork and a single tone hole size - the scale can in principle be derived directly, and without modification, from Equal Temperament calculations as for a guitar fretboard (hence of course Boehm's schema). Most of the difficulties Wibb and colleagues confronted arise from the combination of different tone hole sizes and adjustments for the French-style open hole keys.
This was not even the oldest Louis Lot Wibb had. There are many references in the papers to a flute with the serial number 315, which seems to have had an important reference head-joint for Wibb in testing many of his flutes. As is the way of such things, it appears that this head clearly worked better in some flutes than in others. (Update (8 August 2025): LL head 315 is in the case as part of a Louis Lot flute indicated as #2664, for sale by Just Flutes. The whereabouts of the body and foot of 315 are unknown.)
However, the bulk of the papers in this partial archive identify slightly later instruments (though still old, of a period widely regarded by collectors as the high point of "vintage" Louis Lot production), featuring the "teardrop" Eb key, and seamed very hard drawn tubes.
Most revealing of Wibb's approach are the papers which detail his tuning adjustments, often updated over time. In making these changes, common methods (beyond his celebrated use of patches) included the pragmatic use of, well, 'plasticine' to lower the pitch of a tone hole (he usually used a much more colourful term which I would not want to repeat in a public document; but it can be found in the papers), and "scraping" out a tone hole to raise the pitch by a small but essential amount.
The use of a patch, which implies moving a tone hole by some distance, in excess of 1mm, requires adjusting the keywork, whether by bending or (in the "advanced" way) by unsoldering and remounting the keys on the hinge tubes. Moving the thumb mechanism presents any number of problems, and is best avoided unless there really is no alternative. Whereas the filling and scraping out is used for much smaller adjustments, of say 0.4mm, allowing the existing keywork to remain unaltered.
Of course all of this modification dismays collectors, who cherish flutes only in "original condition" - even if they were produced in the high thousands. These instruments formed the foundation – the laboratory – of Wibb's tireless research, and at the same time established in the minds and hearts of so many players that with such changes (especially, of course, if expertly and invisibly done by Albert Cooper) these flutes could not only be rescued from street markets in Paris but played in tune at modern pitch in the most demanding professional contexts.
The Flutes.
It would be too cumbersome to add thumbnails of everything here. See the archive folder oldflutes for everything. Below is a list of the flutes covered in the archive, with a few comments on each.
There is however one general comment to make which may help in making sense (or not) of some of the numbers. Presented with some new flute, and wanting to evaluate the scale, it is inevitable that some approximate "reverse engineering" has to be done, to, for example, extract what the underlying basic scale might be given the measured hole positions and sizes. For better or worse, flute makers (Boehm excepted!) do not provide such detailed information with the instrument. To tune a flute, however, is simpler as one is applying a new fully worked out scale to the instrument, moving holes (etc) as required.
LL 1685: "with tuning gunk". Notable here is the extreme difference in tone hole sizes, between foot 16.2mm and RH 14.5mm (one even 14.8), and some of the LH tone holes (13.2 and 12.8 v 13.7 and 13.6). The "basic" octave length appears to be 328.8 (the other numbers do not match the ET scale for that length), though how that is obtained is not shown.
LL 1994. This is documented in detail over six pages, and is by far the most analysed flute in the archive. The 315 flute is mentioned in what looks like a comparison (Page 6: "Possibly 315 is the best starting point for 'OK'). Among the many interesting details are a page listing distances between tone holes, firstly between semitones (Page 4) then secondly (Page 6, "Very approximate guess at right size steps") between wider intervals, up to the fifth, but also including the tritone Eb-A.
LL 2336. Note: at the time of writing this is still listed in the " Preowned Vintage" section of the Just Flutes website. The photos suggest a minimum amount of patching (looks like just one hole), so probably one needs to look inside the tone holes to discover if there is any filling or scraping. The single page here is interesting for Wibb's notes succinctly summarising the whole principle of the scientific method: "New idea of what I need. 2336. + ideas from tuning session 4.2.93. – and then see if I can find theory to fit!".
LL 2828. This was Wibb's "best flute", as extensively described in the "Wibb" book. Sadly, no discussion of the scale appears in this archive, but something even more significant does: a comparison between 2828 and an early Altus (1987) scale. Here 2828 seems clearly to be the reference, and any differences in the Altus scale marked as above or below. This leads us naturally to a hugely important stage in Wibb's work: collaborating very closely with Mr Tanaka at Altus. A number of Lots were retuned at Altus, with several flutes retaining the all-important tube but replacing the keywork with modern Altus keywork. Several of these are to be found (at the time of writing) in the collection of Wibb's flutes at Just Flutes awaiting sale, as mentioned above. Note that the use of Altus keywork is undocumented, but the many photographs provided show it clearly.
LL 4714. This page is a (possibly) clear example of arithmetical " show your working".
LL 4842. Another flute retuned and remounted by Altus. There is one large paper in the archive detailing this flute, using the template shown under "Tools". It appears as part of an extended scale study involving a number of modern flutes, collected in the archive folder manyscales. In other words, while the majority of the papers in the archive are singletons, the scale measurements in this study are explicitly shown as a true collection.
Included in that folder is a three-page hand-written letter Wibb may or may not have delivered to Mr Tanaka (they are originals, which of course would not exist in the archive had they been delivered – perhaps Wibb wrote a separate tidy version?). Here is the first page:
