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Jonathantuba wrote:How, when and why did the American practice of having front piston valves start?

Best I can tell, the standard lap tuba used in the U.S. before the turn of the last century was either a small Eb with top-action valves (think Distin) or a larger contrabass rotary tuba (think Helleberg's Sander). The front-piston tuba seems to have appeared after the introduction of the sousaphone as a revitalization of the helicon. The revitalization seems to have been fueled by the popularity and commercial success of Sousa's band. The valve sections on the first front-piston tubas appear to be the same as used on sousaphones, except for the amount of branch tubing above and below the valve.

My 1920's York catalog shows helicons, sousphones (though it calls them helicons with either bell up or bell forward), top-action and front-action tubas. The valve blocks in all of them are the same between tubas and helicons of the same bore.

Then why was a 5th rotary valve added instead of a piston operated by the left hand? It has always seemed strange to me to mix - why not keep to all pistons, or all rotors as preferred?

I suspect it was considered standard practice to manipulate the upper valve slides on left-facing tubas right from the start. There is the picture of Jacobs playing the York with his left hand on the third slide, for example. The rotary 5th is much easier to set up to be operated by the right thumb.

Rick "who thinks the front pistons don't derive from OTS Civil War-era instruments because of the 30 years between them and front-piston tubas" Denney