Category: Electronic Perspectives

The electric pianos designed by Miessner, Vierling, and Nernst established archetypes for that industry during the late ’30s and early ’40s (see my columns for Feb. and Mar. ’78). These pianos were essentially acoustic pianos lacking soundboards, with electrostatic or electromagnetic pickups. They found some use, but these instruments had problems, as explained by Miessner:…

After B.F. Miessner put the finishing touches on his Electronic Piano in 1932, he began licensing almost all of the electric piano industry for the next two decades. His patents were the basis of the Minipiano by Hardman, Peck, and Co., the Electone (ca. 1938) manufactured by Krakauer Brothers under the supervision of Maurice K.…

Benjamin Franklin Miessner (born 1890) is a central figure in the development of the electric piano. His early career was in radio and electro-acoustics. In 1909 he developed an improved “cat whisker” detector used in crystal radio sets. In the ’20s he pioneered the totally electric phonograph for the Brunswick Phonograph Company. Later he produced…

The electric guitar-on-a-slab-of-wood found in today’s rock band has a vibratory tone generator. This involves the translation of mechanical or acoustical vibration into an electrical signal that can be processed by electrical circuitry and turned into sound by a loudspeaker. Keyboards in use today that have a vibratory tone generator include the Wurlitzer and Rhodes…

Where did the electric piano come from? Efforts to “electrify” the acoustic piano in the ’30s grew out of even earlier attempts to modify the instrument by non-electric means. The mood for experimentation was brought about when sales of pianos slumped by fifty percent during the years 1913-1921. Some blamed the decline of the piano…

In this final column in our series on photoelectric instruments, we’ll look at several keyboard instruments of yesteryear that could reproduce recorded acoustic-instrument sounds. (Yes, Virginia, the Mellotron and Orchestron have ancestors!) As explained in my September ’77 column, these instruments used the same principle as the film soundtrack. That is, a varying “mask” is…

Ivan Eremeeff developed the Syntronic Organ around 1934 in collaboration with Leopold Stokowski, who was then the Director of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. This instrument is yet another of the type that has a stationary, illuminated mask governing tone color. However, Eremeeff departed from the typical tone-wheel design [see C.K., July, Aug., Sept. ’77]. Instead…

The “light chopper” tone wheel of the type found in the photoelectric instruments described in my last two columns acts to interrupt the path between a light source and a photoelectric cell. The basic concept is that the amount of light that falls on a photoelectric cell can be manipulated over time in such a…

As explained in last month’s column, a “light chopper,” or rotating tone wheel, can be used to interrupt the light shining onto a photoelectric cell, generating alternating current that creates pitched sound. The Austrian Emerich Spielmann used the rudiments of this concept in his Superpiano, a photoelectric instrument developed during the early 1930s. But before…

The photoelectric tone generator is one of the oldest and most popular designs for early electric musical instruments. The roots of this idea can be traced to 1890, when Ernest J.P. Mercadier used a rotating light interrupter with light-sensitive cells to create frequencies used for multiplex telegraphy. (This made it possible to send many messages…

Marshall McLuhan, media sage, says that the content of a new medium is likely to be an older medium. Some of the early movies contained vaudeville, and the content of television is often the older medium of film. When the videotape system becomes commonplace, its primary content will probably be television. Perhaps the content of…

The father of the Hammond Organ may have been a clock. At least, the tone-wheel Hammond Organ is driven by a synchronous motor similar in design to the motor of the electric clock that was the first product of the Hammond Company. The secret of this clock’s accuracy was the motor which synchronized its speed…

Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium (1906) wasn’t a commercial success, but the principles it embodied were used in later rotating-wheel electromagnetic instruments. The design based on Cahill’s often consists of a number of iron disks with indented edges which are mounted on a shaft and arranged to rotate in front of an electromagnetic pickup. The pitch depends…

Thaddeus Cahill (1867-1934) was a rare designer who combined a talent for invention with the legal expertise to patent his ideas and the business acumen to interest investors in his turn-of-the-Century Telharmonium. This massive instrument, also known as the Dynamophone, was virtually an electric power generating plant, with dynamos rotating at the frequencies of the…

The earliest use of electricity to make music was in motor-driven acoustic instruments such as Delaborde’s Electric Harpsichord (1759). And some of the first discoveries in electrically produced sound happened accidentally, as when in 1837 Dr. C.G. Page inadvertently discovered the principle of the electronic tuning fork while experimenting with magnets and coils. In 1885,…