Pipeless Organ

If a professional pool-player were suddenly confronted with a table the size of a Ouija board which answered all his requirements, he would have been no more amazed than the professional musicians who flocked last week to hear a new electrical organ on view at the Industrial Arts Exposition in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center. This new organ had no pipes. It was much smaller than a small upright piano and it cost only $1,250, as compared with $4,000 & up for most pipe organs.

Composer George Gershwin was one of the first skeptical listeners but he signed the first sale order. Honest Fritz Reiner, Philadelphia's opera conductor, spoke praisingly at the first demonstration. Soloist was Organist Pietro Yon of St. Patrick's Cathedral (TIME, May 7, 1934). Under his command, the new instrument seemed capable of a thousand effects. It was full-toned and rich, eerie and soft. In a modern pipe organ, similar sounds depend on electric blowers. A separate pipe is required for each separate tone. Mechanism of the new instrument is all in the console, in a bed of magnets, coils and whirling disks. With the turn of a switch, the motor was on and at the touch of a key, electrical vibrations generated the sound through an ordinary amplifier.

Inventor was Laurens Hammond, quiet, hard-working head of Hammond Clock Co. of Chicago. Inventor Hammond has tinkered with electricity since he left Cornell in 1916. Though no bridge player, he invented a few years ago an electrical bridge table which shuffles and deals the cards. Though no musician, he saw that a pipeless organ would have many a practical advantage. Pipes require space, are expensive to install. Usually they anchor an organ for life, and changes in temperature will set them out of tune.

The Hammond organ can be plugged into the wall with an ordinary electric cord, costs less than 1-c-an hour to operate. Tone quality in a pipe organ is limited to the number of pipes. The Hammond organ can produce countless variations simply by setting a few switches and thus combining or eliminating the various electrical impulses which make the harmonics.

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