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Guest Larstrup

The Organ

By Guest Larstrup, in The Beer Bar

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RA1 Grand Master

RA1

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On 8/10/2019 at 9:57 PM, AdamSmith said:

 

This guy is not as cute as your usual.  :)

Best regards,

RA1

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lookin Grand Master

lookin

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Not sure how I missed hearing about the Telharmonium all these years, but I guess better late than never.

Teleharmonium.jpg

Also called the Dynamophone by its inventor, Dr. Thaddeus Cahill, this early electric organ is considered the first electromechanical musical instrument.  Cahill invented it in 1897, before vacuum tubes were used to generate electrical waveforms and, in fact, before vacuum tubes themselves were even invented.  It used a “tonewheel” mounted to an electric motor to generate a waveform in an adjacent electromagnetic coil.

440px-Tonewheel-p.svg.png

The number of nubs on the wheel and the speed of the electric motor determined the frequency of the waveform generated by the coil.  While the principal was pretty straightforward, the implementation was not.  It took some fairly heavy-duty gear to generate a single frequency.

440px-Goldschmidt_tone_wheel.jpg

And, since a large number of individual frequencies were required - simultaneously no less - to produce a tune, it makes sense that the Telharmonium was a large device by any standards.  The first model that Cahill constructed - the Mark I - weighed seven tons!

telharmonium.jpg

By the time he got to the Mark II, the beast weighed in at over 200 tons and required 670 kilowatts of electricity to operate!

telharmonium.jpg

Obviously, Cahill couldn’t easily move it around to find his audiences, and amplifiers hadn’t been invented yet, so his idea was to transmit the sound produced by the Telharmonium over the telephone system which was just getting going around this time.

s-l225.jpg

There weren’t any loudspeakers then either, so Cahill figured he’d send a full ampere of current down the line to each telephone and get the earpiece vibrating so loudly that the listener didn’t even need to pick it up to listen.

This, of course, begat its own set of problems, crosstalk in particular, so that early telephone users would sometimes hear strange musical sounds interfering with their voice calls.  One story has it “that a New York businessman, infuriated by the constant network interference, broke into the building where the Telharmonium was housed and destroyed it, throwing pieces of the machinery into the Hudson river below.”

For a while, around the turn of the century, Cahill leased a space at 39th and Broadway and gave live performances of his invention, while sending the music down the telephone wires to those who were interested in hearing it, as well as to some who were not interested in hearing it.

Sadly, no recordings of the Telharmonium exist today and Cahill’s brother scrapped whatever remnants of the device remained in 1950.  But the tonewheel mechanism and Cahill's designs formed the basis for the original Hammond organ four decades later.  By that time, vaccuum tubes, electronic amplifiers and loudspeakers had been invented and Cahill’s original ideas lived on and thrived.

By the way, a two hundred ton instrument would be about the equivalent of a hundred Honda Civics in mass.  Dr. Cahill was nothing if not committed to getting his music out to the public.  :thumbsup:

Teleharmonium-Bank_of_Alternators_Tone_S

Edited by lookin
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