The Cable Company

The Cable Company (earlier, Wolfinger Organ Company, Chicago Cottage Organ Company; sometimes called by the name of its subsidiary, The Cable Piano Company) was an American manufacturer and distributor of pianos and reed organs that operated independently from 1880 to 1936.

Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the company proclaimed itself "the world's greatest manufacturer of pianos, inner player pianos, and organs". It was indubitably one of the largest, and maintained that status for several decades during the apogee of U.S. piano sales, the so-called Golden Age of the Piano. Trade publications of the day called it "the largest reed organ house in the world, and the largest wholesaler in the world of medium-grade pianos" (1895); "the largest piano and organ makers in the world" (1904); and "one of the 'great leaders' in the trade" (1922). Its premium Conover line of pianos was noted as belonging to "the highest grade manufactured".

The decline of the piano market in the late 1920s followed by the Great Depression forced The Cable Company to merge with another northern-Illinois piano maker in 1936, becoming The Schiller Cable Manufacturing Company. In 1950, the merged company was subsumed into the Aeolian Company, which closed in 1984.