August 31, 2023 • 50 mins
Laurens Hammond invented the Hammond organ and in the process changed music history. But he was much more than that.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody in Orlando.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
We feel pretty sure that you've heard the news, but
if you haven't, our show that was postponed has been
rescheduled for Friday, September eighth, which is great news.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Yeah, it is great news. If you thought a Saturday
show is going to be great, wait until you see
us on a Friday, Orlando.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
That's right, and the Vinue should have gotten in touch
with you by now.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Your tickets are still good. If you cannot go, we're
very sad, but you can get a refund on that.
And hey, if you're available now on Friday September eighth,
come and see us in Orlando.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, tickets are still available, and you can get all
the information you need by going to leaktree, slash sysk
or stuff youshould do dot com and check out our
on tour page and we'll see you September eighth. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
(00:56):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Cherry's
here too, and this is stuff you should know. Part
of our ongoing musical saga frequently overlooked, but when we
do him, can we hit him out of the Park.
Remember remember the one where we talked about pitch and
we got every single thing we could have possibly gotten
wrong wrong.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I file this more sort of in the same category
as the great episodes we did on Les Paul and
Leo Fender.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Music, Yeah, but you know why you got to bring
up our worst music one?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
What else have we're done some other musical stuff, haven't
we've done like actual genres punk and hip hop and.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah disco, Yes, great one, you love that one.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
We have a robust musical suite going, and this adds
to it. I think this is a good idea in
your part, because we're talking about a guy who I
always thought his first name was John, and I couldn't
figure out why, and then I realized that Jurassic Park,
Jurassic Park, his name was John Hammond. It's funny, for sure.
So its name actually isn't John, It's Lawrence. But I
(02:04):
think you pronounce it like Lawrence, but it's spelled Lawrenz.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, I've heard Lorenz Hammond. Oh really Yeah, anyway, by Larry,
so he'll just came Larry.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Yeah, that's why I thought they probably pronounced it Lawrence.
But if you recognize his last name, not from Jurassic Park,
but from the electric organ. Because he was indisputably the
inventor of the electric organ. He was the first guy
to really put everything together and make it work.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Specifically obviously the Hammond organ and very much notably the
Hammond B three, which was one of the organs in
his line of organs. And if you are a piano
player or an organist, a keyboard person, then you're like,
oh yeah, speak to me, baby.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
If you're not, and you're like a Hammond B three,
what's that? It is the sound of rock and roll.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
It is.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Refugee by Tom Petty and half the Songs of Boston,
and it's oh yeah, you know the big organ solo
in the Big Boston Suite. It is like a rolling
stone by Bob Dylan and a wider shade of Pale
by Procol Harum.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
It is in so many songs that you know and
love one of the more.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
And that's not to mention you know, jazz and everything
else that the Hammond B three was used for. But
it really made his mark on rock and roll in
the sixties and seventies. Even though it was built and
created in nineteen thirty five, and even though Larry Hammond
by all accounts was tone deaf and did not play
(03:46):
a note of any instrument ever in his life.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, I mean that by his own admission. From what
I understand, it's like Leo Fender. Yeah, I forgot about that.
But yeah, one other I think one other group that
requires shouting. I think doctor Teith played a Hammond B three.
Of course, absolutely, I'm pretty sure. So, yeah, he Larry
Hammond didn't know what he was doing with music, but
(04:10):
he knew what he was doing with engineering, specifically electrical engineering,
which at the time he was studying this he was
born in eighteen ninety five, started studying in the first
couple decades of the twentieth century. This was some brand
new stuff. And this guy was at the bleeding edge
of the whole thing, leading, which I used correctly. Finally,
(04:33):
did you say leading or bleeding? I said bleeding.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
No, bleeding is when it leads to bad things.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
People have been electrocuted.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Okay, that's a good point.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
So Hammond was born a young boy in just outside Chicago,
in the suburb of Evanston, Illinois, like you said, in
eighteen ninety five, and he was the only boy of
four kids. He had three sisters, had a father who
was a banker who died when he was two, and
a mother named is a great name, Idea Strong Hammond,
(05:05):
who was an impressionist painter and you know, pretty accomplished
in an artist and a creative. So once mister Hammond dies,
when little Larry's just too she says, you know what,
I'm packing up my three girls and my son and
we're going to Europe where you can be submerged in
(05:25):
the arts and get what I think is probably a
more proper education.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah. So from the time they moved there when he
was four till the time they moved back to Evanston
when he was fourteen, they lived in Geneva, in Dresden
and Paris. And one of the things about Larry Hammond
was from an extraordinarily young age, he was a tinkerer.
He wanted to know how things worked. And when they
landed in Paris, I'm not sure exactly what h he
(05:51):
was at the time. I think he was a tween possibly,
but France was like this was when the first cars
were really being designed to built and France was the
epicenter of that, and Larry little Larry Hammond happened to
live there at the time, so he was taking apart
engines from a very young age and actually came up
with the crude version of an automatic transmission a decade
(06:16):
before it was ever actually patented. That's what this kid
was doing as a tween.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, yeah, as a twelve year old, he was incredibly brilliant,
probably a genius. I know that word is thrown around
a lot, but if you're doing that kind of thing
when you're twelve in the early twentieth century, then that
qualifies in my book.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, I was putting on like half a bottle of
Polo cologne and wandering around the mall. At this age,
I was.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
In the basement hiding from Satan.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
There you go. That's another thing to do. That's another
thing to do.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So the Hammonds were, like I said, they were all
pretty accomplished. Well, the mom was pretty accomplished, and all
his sisters would go on to do great things. His
sister Unis was a writer and a poet and edited
a poetry magazine. His sister Louise was a missionary in
China who would transcribe Christian hyndls and religious books in
Chinese and his sister Peggy was a musician. She was
(07:13):
a cellist, a world class cellist, but young Larry was
not inclined musically. When they went back to Evanston, Illinois,
he continued continued to sort of experiment and take things
apart and put him back together, and eventually he got
a little taste of success early on, when he was sixteen,
he had his first US patent with a kind of
(07:34):
a new and improved barometer that he ended up making
a few hundred books off of which you know, was
pretty good for a sixteen year old. And the nineteen
what is this twenties at this point, teens.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yeah, he would have been it would have been nineteen four,
nineteen nine, Okay, yeah, nineteen eleven, somewhere in there. All right,
So yeah, he ended up going on to car. I
don't think there was ever any question whether he was
going to or not, thanks to his mom and her
strong will about education and work ethic and he ended
(08:08):
up at Cornell in Ithaca, and apparently, according to the
Larry Hammond legend, he finally kind of came to understand
his own maybe mission in life, if not brilliant. From
when I read you had a bit of an ego
here or there, although he was generally a good guy.
This story kind of jibes.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I've never known any genius inventors to have large egos, right,
It's unusual.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Usually very meek and they hide in the basement from
Satan too.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
But the night before exams, he and his friends went
out to Syracuse and were drinking, drinking, drinking, and caught
the last train back to Ithaca. And when they got
to class, they were still kind of drunk, and Larry
Hammond wandered into the wrong class. Did he not what
happened after that, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Well, apparently he went in on exam day to an
electrical engineering class that he wasn't even taking an ACE
the final or ace the exam.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
I don't know if it was a final.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And I think, like you said, as the legend goes,
that's when he was like, huh, I'm a pretty smart
guy and I am good at inventing things, and so that's.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
What I'm going to dedicate my life to.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Yeah, he's not only that he was going to be
an independent inventor. That is that's a life choice.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Right there, Oh right, like not going to work for
ge or Westinghouse or whatever.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Right, and he didn't. He ended up going somewhere I
don't remember where. He had a couple of jobs for sure,
especially to start out. But the first thing he did
after Cornell was to go and list in World War One. Yeah,
and I think he was stationed in France for a
little while, was mistaken for a French deserter because his
French was so good. Another part of his legend took
(09:51):
a little story. But then after that he moved to
Detroit and he took a job. He became chief engineering
he's still very young, at a company made boat engines,
because remember he had spent a lot of his tweens
taking engines. Apart he could ace an electrical engineering final,
but he also was studying mechanical engineering at the time,
so it makes sense that he was working at a
(10:13):
company that made boat engines.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah, and he it was called the Gray Motor Company.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
And apparently the guy he was working for was someone
that served with him an army and said, I think
it wasn't enough money or something, and under the table,
this guy paid him an extra three hundred bucks a
week that no one knew about, just to keep him
working on these boat engines. Man that he knew he
(10:39):
was that valuable and that he probably shouldn't be making
boat engines. So he greased the wheel, he greased the
palm a little bit, he greased the propeller.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
But remember he wanted to be an independent inventor. And
if you have the spirit of an inventor and the
ego of somebody who can ace an electrical exam without
taking the test, no amount of money is going to
make you satisfied spending your life making boat engines for
somebody else. So he struck out, and I think he
did it the spot.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Struck out as in failed like baseball, no.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
The other way around, like struck out on his own exactly,
just so people know. I think he was still working though,
and like at night, he was working on his own stuff.
So this was while he was working at the boat company,
from what I understand. But he came up with something
called the tickless clock, not ticklish clock, a tickless clock
(11:32):
that you couldn't hear tick because apparently that drove him crazy.
And I feel this guy. If you've ever had a
loud clock in the room with you while you're trying
to sleep, there's nothing else you can concentrate on except
the stupid ticking of that stupid clock. And Larry Hammond
felt the same way, so he invented one that didn't
make the ticking sound.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
That's right, and he was like, you know what, I'm
going to sell this idea. He sold that idea, made
some pretty good money on it, enough that he was
able to move to New York and open up his
own sort of invention factory, and he invented something there
that kind of was the beginning of what would end
up like informing his future career in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
And that was the synchronous motor.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
In America, at the time we were making this is
the early twenties, they were making the switch to sixty
herts from fifty herts. Westinghouse came along and they had
a lot of sway, obviously, and said, you know what,
this arc lighting system we have looks a lot better
at sixty herts. We need everything to be the same,
(12:38):
So United States, can we all move to sixty herts?
In the government said sure.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Right, yeah, oh sorry, So sixty herts is sixty cycles
a second, and it's part of alternating current, which, as
we remember, won out the current wars because you can
send it over very long distances with very little loss
of of energy. Right. Yeah, So they switched over to
(13:04):
sixty cycles a second, and Hammond said, well, wait a minute,
that's that's precise. Like we're talking about a precise like
something is moving back and forth between the poles sixty
times a second, and we're talking about electrons. You can
set your watch by electrons basically. So his synchronous motor
plugged into that sixty cycle a second electrical current, and
(13:27):
it created a motion that spun just as reliably as
those electrons switch poles back and forth sixty times a second.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
And if you're thinking, I don't even know what this means, guys,
who cares? What this means is all of a sudden,
you can electrify things that were previously not electrified. Yeah, like, oh,
I don't know that tickless clock that you still had
to wind over and over, like every clock in the
world that you had to wind over and over.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
By the way, chuck, that tickless clock. The way it
was cliss is the motor was put into a soundproof box.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, pretty easy, which.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Means that you could also say it was a tick
in the box. Okay, So the synchronous motor though, this
was the fact that it was very precise, that it
was going to spin X number of times every second.
That was a really big deal because if you have
something that is that precise and that has is current,
(14:27):
is getting an electrical current that's keeping it that precise,
no matter what, you can do all sorts of things,
Like you said he had an electrical clock. You can
make little shutter spin in front of people's eyes without
them even realizing that they're spinning. All sorts of things
you can do with a synchronous motor, and that was
the basis of a lot of his inventions that followed.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
All right, I think that was a great little tease setup.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I'm sorry for teasing you everybody.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
No, I love it because people are going like, what
do you mean shutters in front of your eyes? Well,
we're gonna explain that right after this. We'll be right back,
(15:27):
all right. So Josh left a great little tease.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I did mention that he started making these clocks, but
this next thing actually happened first because he did have
a lot of success with the Hammond Clock Company because
everyone was like these electric clocks are amazing. I don't
want to wind my clock ever again, and you don't
have to. But before he found success there, he invented,
basically invented three D movies in the silent era of
(15:52):
cinema insane.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
So remember from our stereogram, our magic Eye episode, Yeah,
this is perfect for this. It's basically the same stuff
going on around the same time. But he came up
with something called the tell aview, and you basically created
a film with two cameras set a little bit apart,
and now all of a sudden you've got two slightly
different perspectives of the same thing, which, as you remember
(16:16):
from our Stereograms episode, that I loves to turn into
depth and perspective. So then you project the movie onto
the screen using those two projectors, not overlapping, but alternating
very quickly between the right image and the left image
right image, left image. That sounds like a headache, and
it probably would be if it weren't for the viewers
(16:40):
that Hammond created that every seat had that you looked
at this movie through and when the left image was
up on the screen, a shutter closed over your right eye,
so all you could see was your left image. And
then the same thing for your right eye with the
right image, and this all happens so fast that your
(17:00):
brain didn't make note of it. All it saw were
two slightly different perspectives of the same thing and turned
it into what's called parallax depth based on your position
of where you're sitting and where you're viewing an object.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Amazing, And again, this is all possible because of that
synchredous motor which was spinning these two little things in
front of your eyeballs exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And that nuts. This was the twenties, and this guy
came up with three D and it worked really well.
It worked so well that people were a little put
off by it.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I read an article from The Atlantic that was written
in nineteen forty, a profile of John Hammond. They said
that the movie, the one movie that he made, Hello Mars,
was so crystal clear that it says close ups of
love scenes were almost embarrassing, and you could see the
sweat on the actor's faces. So apparently it was distracting.
(17:52):
It was so realistic and so lifelike that nobody was
following the plot and they were maybe even a little
put off.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
All right, so this isn't working out as far as
being a great business idea. But he was like, you
know what, I still you know, I could make this
thing without those little spinny goggles. He said, I could
actually do it with colored lenses, these little cheap cardboard
things that you know, in thirty years everyone was going
to think is the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
And he did that.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
He created some for Zigfield himself and the Zigfield Follies,
which was the biggest show going in Vaudeville and New York.
He called this the shadow graph, and he had actors
standing behind a transparent screen and he backlit them with
red and a green light spaced a few feet apart,
and then projected their shadows on the screen. And when
you wore those three D glasses, it again created depth
(18:43):
and it looked like they were sort of leaping off
the screen. And Zigfield loved this one. He was like,
I'll pay you seventy five thousand dollars to use this
stuff for two years, which is about one point three
million bucks today.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Do you know how many drachmas it is? How many
four hundred twenty million, five hundred and seventy eight four
plus drachmas today? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
So I mean by this point he's he's rich, or
at the very least, he can use that money to
fund doing whatever he wants to do invention wise.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Being an independent inventor. He's realized his dream by this point.
That's right in the twenty so he was in his twenties. Still,
it's pretty great stuff. Yeah. Also, I saw that this
is the only effect that Zigfield used over two seasons.
Zigfield like to keep things fresh and cutting edge, but
he loved this, this the shadow graph so much that
he used it over two different seasons, which is kind
(19:36):
of an honor in and of itself.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Super cool.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
So let's get back to that synchronous motor, the sixty
cycle second that was so reliable you could never have
to wind a clock from it, right, all right, he Well,
let's go back even further than that, Chuck, Let's go
back to the eighteen nineties, which is the same year
Hammon was born, eighteen ninety five, and there's an American
inventor named that is Khill, who was the first person
(20:03):
to come up with an electro an electro mechanical not
strictly electronic, but it had some gears and stuff to it,
so it was electro mechanical. It's called the teleharmonium. And well,
let's go back even further than that, Chuck, okay to
the eighteen sixties, and we're going to hop on over
to Germany.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
All right, I'm picking up what you're laying down. There
was a German scientist named Hermann von Helmholtz.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
And he.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
He knew music a little bit, and he's like, here's
one thing I know is that when you hear a
musical note, it's a sound way that you're hearing vibrating
at a frequency, like if you hear an a key
on a piano, it's vibrating at a very specific frequency
that makes the sound of what you would call an
a note. But here's the deal, he said, it sounds
(20:54):
more than an a note. It's very warm and there's
depth to it. And he figured out what you're hearing
is called a harmonic, which is, you know, when one
thing vibrates, things near it are also activated and maybe
vibrate a little bit, and these little background frequencies vibrating
along with that a note create this richer, fuller sound
called the harmonic.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah, so, Hemholtz. This big contribution in the eighteen sixties
is to chart all of these harmonics. Yeah, so from
what I understand, then he would go through and say
an a on a cello has all these accompanying vibrations,
and a on a violin has all these different vibrations
and wrote them out as frequencies. Right, So he created
(21:36):
a scientific mathematic roadmap to recreating those frequencies using something
other than a cello or other than a violin. If
you have that information and you can reproduce those frequencies together,
they will make an artificial sound of a violin or
an artificial sound of a cello. This is what Helmholtz contributed,
(21:59):
which is pretty significe to kill.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
All right, So back to k Hill again.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
He was the American inventor who invented the first electro mechanical.
I don't even think you said musical instrument?
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Did I just stop with electro mechanical? Yeah? Man, what sloppy.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That was called now you're not, You're great. That's called
the That was called the telehrmonium. And he created something
called the tone wheel, and it was you really should
look it up. It's kind of hard to describe. It's
this this very large disc shaped motor. It has cogs
and when you spin that rotor that working with a magnet,
like you know, the same way you would with an
(22:35):
electric guitar. Pickup the cogs passed through a magnetic field
by this coiled copper wire around the magnet, and if
you spin it at a steady pace, it's going to
generate a very specific frequency, an electrical frequency, And if
you amplify that, that's where you're going to finally hear
that musical tone come out that Hemholtz was talking about
(22:57):
so many years earlier.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Yeah, so what if you have say four hundred cogs
on this tone wheel, and they passed through the electrical
field four hundred times a second, it makes one full
revolution per second, it will generate a current with a
frequency of four hundred hertz, and that is the same
frequency as an A four note. So what K. Hills
(23:20):
has just done is create a way to reproduce that
a four note or any note you want to if
you can figure out what the frequency is thanks to Hemholtz,
and then build a coog that has that number of
little prongs or something on it thanks to K. Hill.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Right, So what he did, like we mentioned, was create
that teleharmonium, which was sort of like you said, the
very first.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Electro mechanical instrument. But it was a problem because it
was huge.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
It weighed two hundred tons, it costs what would be
seven million dollars today, and it was the size of
a huge train car.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Two point two billion drachmas.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
So obviously this thing's not going to sell. Nobody's interested
in a telharmonium. But that really set the stage for
Larry Hammond's work.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Definitely so. And that's a really important point for inventors
to whenever you talk about an inventor, very very rare
that somebody comes up with a full idea from scratch,
you know, they stand on the shoulders of giants. They
always say, that's what Hammond did. He was the first
person to figure out how to make this stuff practical,
and he had the wit and the brains and the
(24:34):
interest to make it happen. And so after k Hill
basically gave up because he created a seven million dollars
two hundred ton train car of a electro mechanical instrument,
Hammond's was like, I'm going to pick this up. I
never saw Chuck if he knew about k Hill's invention,
or how he knew about k Hill's invention, or if
(24:56):
he was inspired by Kle I'm not sure. I think
that it was who. I don't know, but he basically
took the tone wheel. However, he heard about it, and
he figured out how to make it much smaller, much
more practical. Rather than the size of like a huge cylinder,
it was a size about a silver dollar. And when
you get something that is that useful down to that size,
(25:18):
you can put a bunch of them together and do
some really amazing stuff. And that's what he did. That
was the basis of the Hammond organ That's right.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It didn't initially start out that way though. He had been,
like I said, selling a lot of electric clocks, was
making pretty good money doing that, but then everybody started
making electric clocks and his company wasn't as valuable all
of a sudden. And I don't think we mentioned that
he was. He was an independent adventure but he wanted
to put people to work, like he was very proud
(25:47):
of supplying jobs to people. And he always wanted to
have like his successful company, you know, certainly to enrich himself,
but also so he could so he could put people
to work. I mean, this was a lot of this
stuff was during the depression. A lot of his work
was so he's really proud of putting Americans to work.
And I think Hammond eventually ended up having like three
thousand employees when the organ was at its peak, which
(26:10):
was a really big deal to him.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
But the clock is slowing down, not literally.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
The business was though, and he was a little nervous
about what to do to keep the doors open. So
he initially thought of this tiny tone wheel thing to
just make like a sound, and like, hey, it can
be a gimmick, a little gadget and you can have
this little tone wheel and plug it in and it
makes a sound and kids will love it, almost like
a toy. But he had a assistant treasurer at Hammond
(26:41):
that was a church organist, and the organist was like, man,
you should make an organ. Like if you can make
one sound, you can make a lot of them. And
apparently Hammond loved the sound of a pipe organ, and
that was it. He had the other thing, which was
kind of funny that he was making a lot of
money on there also when away was this auto dealing
(27:03):
bridge table. It was a bridge table that under the
table had a little mechanical system that shuffled and dealt
cards literally under the table to each player, and he
sold fourteen thousand of those wow in two years.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
But then everyone got tired of that.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
So he was always looking for the next thing to
keep the doors open, and this, like, let's replicate a
pipe organ, was the next big thing.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Yeah. One other thing about him. As a boss too
and a company owner, he was smart enough to surround
himself with other very smart engineers, and in particular is
a guy named John Hannert who basically co created the
Hammond organ with Hammond. I almost have the impression that
of the two, Hammond was the idea guy and Hannert
(27:49):
was the one who figured out how to do it.
But when you put them together, what they did was
they took these tone wheels and at the behest of
the organ, playing treasurer at the Hammond company realized that
if you took ninety one of them, you could essentially
reproduce all the sounds that a pipe organ could make,
(28:11):
which is really something because a pipe organ can make
quite a bit of very rich sounds, a lot of
different sounds. That's kind of the point of a pipe organ.
I didn't realize until researching this is that it's meant
to not only just sound like an organ, but it's
also meant to mimic other instruments, and it does that
by mimicking the timber of a different thing. A timber
(28:33):
is like like you were talking about, where if you
play an A on a piano, it sounds different than
an A on a cello. Well, the difference is timber.
And if you can again figure out the harmonics surrounding
that note, you can recreate what it sounds like on
a piano in a or an A on a cello
and that pipe. Organs were able to do this. They
(28:53):
did it using compressed air mechanical stuff. John Hammon was
the one who's like, I can take one of these
giant things and size it down and make this whole
The same thing happen with electronics.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, it's like you know today, if you go buy
a cassio keyboard, it's going to say, you know, horns, strings, right, flute, trumpet,
guitar and those things never sound. Strings do a pretty
good job, but you know when you hit the if
you play a series of horns, you're not going to
(29:25):
say like, oh my gosh, is they're a mariachi band
in here. It approximates the sound in a fun and
useful way.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Even the samba beat's not going to dress that up
enough to pass muster, but you're right.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
At the very least, this was like a big deal.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Pipeworkins could do it to get different sounds that would
you know, like this is a flute or an organ
version of a flute.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Essentially, Yeah, they're called those were the stops. Like you
would pull a stop to let a rank or timber
of pipes play. You could close the stop to keep
that one from playing and allow other ones to play.
One of Hammon's big breakthroughs was to figure out how
to do that again electronically.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Like, if you've ever seen a pipe organ up close,
they have these little round knobs and that's called the
stop knob, and it's either on or off, and you
pull it in or pull it out, and that's letting
compressed pressurized air in or out to change the sound.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
I saw that. That's where the term the phrase pulling
out all the stops comes from. When you have all
the stops open, all the type are playing at the
same time, which is yeah, pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
So Hammond figures all this out. He gets a piano guts.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
It installs platinum switches, installs eight and a half miles
of wiring, installs hundreds of transistors, and they are spinning
these tiny tone wheel motors when you press a key,
and it's it's pretty ingenious. So all of a sudden,
he's electrified this thing, even though he doesn't play a
musical instrument, and he's instead of using these these mechanical stops,
(30:57):
he has these these switches called tone bars. So if
you ever see a Hammon organ and you see above
the keys there kind of where the stop knobs are
in an organ, they're these little little bars that you
can just pull in or out and it has the
same effect basically. And you know, depending on who you are,
(31:17):
you might have your favorite tone bar settings for different songs.
I think the classic, like Jimmy Smith was this guy
that was sort of really popularized at jazz organ and
everyone knows like this is the Jimmy Smith setting. Like
if you go to YouTube and you're talking about different
tone bar settings, they'd be like, oh, yeah, Jimmy Smith
pulled all three of these on the left out and
(31:38):
that was his setting, and you can replicate this stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, So One of the things that Hammond was interested
in doing too, was rather than say, you know, make
this combination and it's the strings, or make this combination
it's the flute. Yeah, he left it up to the person.
So like those those stops would have to do with
like attack and decay, like how fast the sound started
(32:02):
and how long it took to finally like go silent again.
These were like what the sound bars were doing. It
wasn't like, oh, I'll press this button and now it's
a string and the reason why I did that. He'd
likened it in an interview. I saw to how like
a true painter would never buy a flesh pink paint.
They would they would buy a red paint and a
(32:23):
white paint, and you know, orange paint and green paint,
but like they would make their own paint. He was saying,
like his ham and organ allows an organist to create
their own sounds by putting together this basic stuff and
creating something incredibly rich. And in fact, I think they
calculated that there were two hundred and fifty three million
(32:45):
possible tonal variations that you could come up with with
the Hammond Organ.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Amazing. That's from thirty eight drawbars really really cool. Yeah,
for sure, should we take a breaker now, I was
gonna say we should probably take a break.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Yeah, yeah, all right, let's do it. So Hammond's Organs
(33:33):
took off really quickly. I think he sold fourteen hundred
or something like that the first year. Imagine that, chuck. Yeah,
it's a lot so and I think they were originally
about thirty thousand dollars today. I don't know how many drakmas,
but they were twelve hundred and fifty dollars in the
thirties the mid thirties, and it's a lot of money.
(33:54):
Like you had to be wealthy, and you had to
be really into music, or you had to have a
church that was kind of wealthy to afford it. But
that's who he marketed to, serious musicians, home musicians, professional musicians,
but also churches more than anything. And it worked. Like
you sold fourteen in the first year.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah, George Gershwin supposedly the first person to buy one,
even though Henry Ford said he wanted the first six.
But as the story goes, George Gershwan got the first.
He's selling to a like you said, a lot of churches.
I think what was the number, like by nineteen sixty five,
more than fifty thousand churches had Hammond organs. By nineteen
(34:38):
thirty eight there were one thousand churches, but also baseball stadium.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
So if you've ever been to a baseball.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Stadium, they play those Hammond organs radio soap operas very
early on, you know started you know, if you remember
like the dramatic music of us So on the radio,
that was an organ, a Hammond organ. So nineteen thirty six,
this is just one year into the Hammond organ. Things
are really really doing well. And the pipe organ industry
(35:06):
starts complaining to the FTC and they're like, this guy
is out there making all these claims about how you
can replicate every sound on a pipe organ, how it
sounds the same as a ten thousand dollars pipe organ,
and like these are false claims and he can't say
that stuff. So the FTC started snooping around and they said,
(35:28):
you know what, you can't make these claims. You can't
say that stuff in your ads, and we're going to
give you a cease and desist letter that says like
what you can and can't say. And Hammond says, you
know what we should do, We should have a blind
listening test of it's like a John Henry thing, like
my little I think it was a twenty six hundred
(35:50):
dollars organ that he used and a seventy five thousand
dollars pipe organ and let's go head to head and
have experts listen in and say what they think.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Yeah, so that's what they staged I think, I think
in nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, well I think that happened in thirty seven, but
this had been he'd been fighting with the FTC for
a while at that point.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Okay, so yeah, that was exactly the kind of guy
he was. He would he was exactly the kind of
person to come up with a blind listening test to
settle things with the FTC. You know, that's not how
the FTC did things, but John Hammond kind of made
them do it that way. And it was really really
risky because he he would have been essentially guilty of
(36:28):
unfair business practices and that could have all sorts of
terrible effects. But from what I saw that they weren't
going to let him use the name or the word
organ for his instrument anymore. H Really, I'm guessing that
that would have had a pretty big damper on business
as well. So he had a lot riding on this
blind test, and it was very mavericky to suggest it
(36:49):
in the first place. But in nineteen thirty seven at
the University of Chicago Chapel they went head to head.
They hid speakers, Hammond speakers among the pipes, and put
both the organ, the hammin organ and the pipe organ
behind screens, and they had thirty different little pieces of
music and each one played fifteen, and that panel of
(37:13):
judges that you mentioned, they marked down which of those
thirty they thought had played it the pipe organ or
the hammin organ.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah, and these were professional musicians judging. I think there
were nine of them. Most of them were organists, of course.
And then he also had fifteen college students, and he
ended up basically winning. I think they I saw different
numbers of how much they were correctly identifying. They were
(37:42):
wrong a third of the time. I saw they were
wrong half of the time. At the end of the day,
what happened was the FTC said, and this is nineteen
thirty eight by this point, so this thing's dragging out.
They said, all right, here's a new season dissorder. You
can't say it can reproduce a ten thousand dollars organ
because they could tell the difference there. But you know,
(38:03):
they did find that produced like other words that were using,
was that it sounded real, that it was produced fine music,
that it produced beautiful music. And he was able to
use this wordage and all his ads moving forward, which
he took as a big victory.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Yeah, oh for sure. And I believe it was out
of that battle where they calculated the two hundred and
fifty three million different tonal sounds. Oh interesting, And I
believe they started using that for marketing too, because if
you ask me, if I'm just an ordinary Joe, two
hundred and fifty three million different tones and makes the
(38:40):
as good a sound as a pipe organ, I'm gonna
be more wowed by the two hundred and fifty three
million tones, even though the pipe organ makes three hundred
million different tones, because the pipe organ people aren't out
there marketing to me like that.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
And John Hammond is so if you're a Joe keyboardist, yeah,
you see the value in this thing, for sure.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Everyone talked about Joe the plumber. No one ever talked
about Joe the keeper.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Oh man, I forgot about Joe the Plumber.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Good lord, is that Sarah Palin?
Speaker 3 (39:08):
I don't remember. I don't remember. But if you're going
to make a movie about the two thousand aughtsright, having
him like somewhere in the background would really be a
nice touch. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
And Soybomb?
Speaker 3 (39:22):
What was that?
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Soybomb was the guy who rushed the stage and I
think it was a Grammy's during Bob Dylan's acceptance speech.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Oh really, I don't remember that at all.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
And he had a shirt on this said Soybomb.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
No, I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah, I can't remember the year, and I'm sure I
got some of that wrong, but Soybomb and it was right.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
It wasn't Bob Dylan. It was Bob Newhart, that's right.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
When he went was Grammy? All right?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
So he's backtilling these organs again. Famous people are using him.
Baseball team stadiums are using him. Soap operas and churches.
Everyone's getting on board. A woman comes along by the
name of Ethel Smith, who probably did more to popularize
the Hammond or than anybody else.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
She was in a movie, a Red.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Skelt movie called Bathing Beauty and played this song, and
it's on YouTube. You should check it out. Ladies got
crazy fingers. She's so fast, And it was like a
Brazilian kind of song called Tico Tico that became a
smash international musical sensation.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Yes, and Ethel Smith was she kind of idolized John
Hammond because she realized what he had done by creating
this Hammond organ, and so it was kind of symbiotic.
Even though she didn't meet him until much later, but
she always kind of idolized him and was very grateful
to him. Yeah, because you know, without her or without him,
(40:41):
she said, she would have probably gotten into an older
profession than music, right what she meant. And then without her,
his his organ just wouldn't have been as well known.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I think, yeah, absolutely, that song was huge.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Also, Jimmy Smith, the afore mentioned no relation to Ethel
jazz musician, even though people before him used it, he
really kind of took it to a new level. And
then we have to talk about because I know there
are keyboard players and Hammond enthusiasts. They're like, guys, you
can't talk about the ham and organ without talking about
the Leslie speaker. Yeah, if you've ever been to a show,
(41:20):
a concert and you've seen a ham and Organ. I
almost guarantee you that sitting beside that organ is this
giant brown wooden box that doesn't even look like a
speaker because it doesn't have a big, round, graded panel
like most speakers do. And you might be thinking, what
in the world is that thing? Even that is called
a Leslie speaker and it is the key I think
(41:44):
to and many people agree to what makes the Hamm
and Organ sound so amazing?
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Yeah, and Don Leslie was like, Hey, I came up
with this speaker that works really well with your organ
and makes it sound a lot better. Can I come
work for you or do you want to buy my idea?
And remember I said at the outset that Hammond was
kind of egotistical here or there, and he was also
I think you said, tone deaf. And apparently when you
put those two things together, he wasn't at all impressed
(42:10):
with Leslie's invention because he couldn't hear any difference. And
he also, I think didn't really like somebody telling him
that they had come up with something that improved on
his invention totally. So for decades there was a almost
a one sided cold war between the Hammond Company, or
specifically I think I called him John Hammond, Larry Hammond
(42:33):
and Don Leslie and Leslie's company. He's had no expense.
He would he would not entertain the idea of using
these Leslie speakers in his organs. He wouldn't let anybody
else do it. But they worked so well, Chuck, that
if you were a Hammond dealer, an authorized Hammond dealer,
you would secretly like if somebody came in and bought
(42:56):
a B three from you, you'd be like, let me
show you something in the back, and you'd take them
back there. You'd be like, you really have to have
this because it makes it so much better.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah. He would even change the switches out from year
to year so you couldn't use it like you had
to modify it basically to use with a B Leslie.
So the Leslie is really interesting. It's probably we should
do a short stuff on it. But the secret to
the Leslie is it's also electro mechanical because it takes
your sound and instead of just pumping it out like
(43:26):
a regular speaker, it shoots the sound in two directions.
It shoots it down to a base speaker that is
literally rotating, and shoots it up to these two cones.
They look like sort of like the old ear cones
that you would put to your ear to hear somebody
better if you are hard of hearing. That were on
what looks like kind of like a record turntable, and
(43:49):
these things spin and it would shoot the sound toward that,
and the sound would spin through these spinning cones and
come out the other side through the speaker. It did,
you know, it's not like it didn't have any venting
for sound. It had these little slits at the top,
but not like a big, huge round hole yah.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
And it was a belt driven.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Thing by a motor, and these things would spin and
it was a variable speed, so if you had it
really really slow, it was sort of a warble. If
you spun it really really fast, it's that sound of
classic rock that you know and love, or just rock
and roll. If you hear a key pressed with that
Leslie speaker spinning at top speed, it's that vibrato that
(44:35):
instead of just the ware, and it makes an organ
sound flat by comparison when you're not using one, I'll bet,
and really just brings it alive in a small space. So,
you know, a pipe organ one of the reasons a
pipe organ sounds great is because it's used in a cathedral.
If you're in your basement and you can't replicate a
(44:55):
really great sound, this Leslie really aids in that.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
The other thing it does as it serves as an
alternate portal to Narnia. Once it gets spinning really fast,
tears open the fabric of time and space.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yeah, so hats off to Don Leslie. You know, just
a genius invention to go hand in hand, and I
wish Larry Hammond had embraced it, but.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Oh he did not.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Yeah, the ego got in the way.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I think even after he retired he tried to prevent
the company from from doing business with hand with Leslie. Yeah. Yeah,
basically right when he died, they started adding Leslie speakers
to their setups. It's pretty cool. So Larry Hammond, I
think I said John again. If I did, I'm sorry everybody.
(45:43):
I'm just gonna move forward. But he's he was more
than just the ham and organ inventor and the tickless clock,
the tick in the box clock inventor, or the automatic
bridge table inventor. He did all sorts of other stuff too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
He then probably the first synthesizer it's called the novachord.
It's you should watch youtubes of this thing if you're
into musical instruments like old time Ewins's.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
This was in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Robert Mogue was a five year old who you know,
gets credited as being the synthesizer inventor, so he invitted
the novachord.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
He invented all kinds of great stuff. I think he died.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
After his death, he ended up with one hundred and
ten patents to his name. CBS bought he died in
nineteen seventy three. CBS had bought Hammond in nineteen sixty five.
They had also bought the Fender guitar company, so that's
when CBS thought it was in the music instrument business
for a little while. Hammond bought it back in nineteen
(46:44):
eighty from CBS. In eighty five they went out of business.
So like the last true Hammond B three I think
rolled off the line in those years and there I
think they made a couple of million organs. So it's
not like if you want to and B three organ
you can find them today. It's they aren't cheap, but
it's not like some huge rare collector item.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
One other thing I thought I thought was noteworthy, Chuck
a while back, you talked about how he was, like,
you know, a good boss, and he was very proud
of employing people. Two different presidents of the ham and
Company started out at the bottom. One is an office
boy and one in the mailroom and worked their way up.
That's I mean, just having one president having done that
(47:28):
is pretty impressive, but two is really significant. And really
I think it says a lot about the kind of
company he built totally.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Suzuki, by the way, as a PostScript, bought Hammond in
nineteen eighty nine, right Suzuki of the motorcycle keyboard fame. Sure,
And in two thousand and two they started making a
new version of the B three again. I think it's
called the x K three. And I listened to a comparison.
I'm sure where players I purists will say like, no, man,
(48:02):
you gotta have the original Hammond.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
But it sounded just like it to me. It's a
little brighter.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Maybe they need to set up a blind listening test.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
We should have at the Rockefeller Cathedral in Chicago. But uh, anyway,
that XK three, it sounded pretty good to me. Cool
for my dumb semi musical year.
Speaker 3 (48:22):
Uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (48:24):
I got nothing else. I enjoy these.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
We'll have to.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
I don't think we've done one of Mog yet, have we?
Speaker 3 (48:29):
I don't think so you keep saying Mogue. It's very
clearly Moog it's mo I don't know.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
But uh we should. We should do him one day.
I love I love covering these sort of pioneers and
musical invention.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Yeah, it's it's a good little sweet we're building. Okay, agreed,
A sweet sweet, So Chuck said, sweet sweet everybody, And
as longtime listeners know that just unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
I'm gonna call this quick correction. Hey, guys, love the show,
Thanks for tech the hard stuff. A quick correction from
the zenobiotics episode, Josh says during the explanation of p
fas that they get into the municipal wastewater and we
have no idea how to get them out of our water.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
That isn't true.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Granular activated carbon and reverse osmosis are two ways to
remove p fas from water. Lots of drinking water treatment
systems are currently using this technology as we speak to
remove p fasts, not saying they're an expensive and difficult
to manage, but they do exist.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Keep up the great work, Whitney B.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Thanks a lot, Whitney B. With that bit of good news,
I'm glad we can get p fasts out of our water. Yes.
If you want to be like Whitney B and say
listen to me, you can send it in an email
to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody in Orlando.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
We feel pretty sure that you've heard the news, but
if you haven't, our show that was postponed has been
rescheduled for Friday, September eighth, which is great news.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Yeah, it is great news. If you thought a Saturday
show is going to be great, wait until you see
us on a Friday, Orlando.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
That's right, and the Vinue should have gotten in touch
with you by now.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Your tickets are still good. If you cannot go, we're
very sad, but you can get a refund on that.
And hey, if you're available now on Friday September eighth,
come and see us in Orlando.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, tickets are still available, and you can get all
the information you need by going to leaktree, slash sysk
or stuff youshould do dot com and check out our
on tour page and we'll see you September eighth. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
(00:56):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Cherry's
here too, and this is stuff you should know. Part
of our ongoing musical saga frequently overlooked, but when we
do him, can we hit him out of the Park.
Remember remember the one where we talked about pitch and
we got every single thing we could have possibly gotten
wrong wrong.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
I file this more sort of in the same category
as the great episodes we did on Les Paul and
Leo Fender.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Music, Yeah, but you know why you got to bring
up our worst music one?
Speaker 3 (01:31):
What else have we're done some other musical stuff, haven't
we've done like actual genres punk and hip hop and.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah disco, Yes, great one, you love that one.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
We have a robust musical suite going, and this adds
to it. I think this is a good idea in
your part, because we're talking about a guy who I
always thought his first name was John, and I couldn't
figure out why, and then I realized that Jurassic Park,
Jurassic Park, his name was John Hammond. It's funny, for sure.
So its name actually isn't John, It's Lawrence. But I
(02:04):
think you pronounce it like Lawrence, but it's spelled Lawrenz.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Yeah, I've heard Lorenz Hammond. Oh really Yeah, anyway, by Larry,
so he'll just came Larry.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Yeah, that's why I thought they probably pronounced it Lawrence.
But if you recognize his last name, not from Jurassic Park,
but from the electric organ. Because he was indisputably the
inventor of the electric organ. He was the first guy
to really put everything together and make it work.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Specifically obviously the Hammond organ and very much notably the
Hammond B three, which was one of the organs in
his line of organs. And if you are a piano
player or an organist, a keyboard person, then you're like,
oh yeah, speak to me, baby.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
If you're not, and you're like a Hammond B three,
what's that? It is the sound of rock and roll.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
It is.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Refugee by Tom Petty and half the Songs of Boston,
and it's oh yeah, you know the big organ solo
in the Big Boston Suite. It is like a rolling
stone by Bob Dylan and a wider shade of Pale
by Procol Harum.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
It is in so many songs that you know and
love one of the more.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
And that's not to mention you know, jazz and everything
else that the Hammond B three was used for. But
it really made his mark on rock and roll in
the sixties and seventies. Even though it was built and
created in nineteen thirty five, and even though Larry Hammond
by all accounts was tone deaf and did not play
(03:46):
a note of any instrument ever in his life.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, I mean that by his own admission. From what
I understand, it's like Leo Fender. Yeah, I forgot about that.
But yeah, one other I think one other group that
requires shouting. I think doctor Teith played a Hammond B three.
Of course, absolutely, I'm pretty sure. So, yeah, he Larry
Hammond didn't know what he was doing with music, but
(04:10):
he knew what he was doing with engineering, specifically electrical engineering,
which at the time he was studying this he was
born in eighteen ninety five, started studying in the first
couple decades of the twentieth century. This was some brand
new stuff. And this guy was at the bleeding edge
of the whole thing, leading, which I used correctly. Finally,
(04:33):
did you say leading or bleeding? I said bleeding.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
No, bleeding is when it leads to bad things.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
People have been electrocuted.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Okay, that's a good point.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
So Hammond was born a young boy in just outside Chicago,
in the suburb of Evanston, Illinois, like you said, in
eighteen ninety five, and he was the only boy of
four kids. He had three sisters, had a father who
was a banker who died when he was two, and
a mother named is a great name, Idea Strong Hammond,
(05:05):
who was an impressionist painter and you know, pretty accomplished
in an artist and a creative. So once mister Hammond dies,
when little Larry's just too she says, you know what,
I'm packing up my three girls and my son and
we're going to Europe where you can be submerged in
(05:25):
the arts and get what I think is probably a
more proper education.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Yeah. So from the time they moved there when he
was four till the time they moved back to Evanston
when he was fourteen, they lived in Geneva, in Dresden
and Paris. And one of the things about Larry Hammond
was from an extraordinarily young age, he was a tinkerer.
He wanted to know how things worked. And when they
landed in Paris, I'm not sure exactly what h he
(05:51):
was at the time. I think he was a tween possibly,
but France was like this was when the first cars
were really being designed to built and France was the
epicenter of that, and Larry little Larry Hammond happened to
live there at the time, so he was taking apart
engines from a very young age and actually came up
with the crude version of an automatic transmission a decade
(06:16):
before it was ever actually patented. That's what this kid
was doing as a tween.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, yeah, as a twelve year old, he was incredibly brilliant,
probably a genius. I know that word is thrown around
a lot, but if you're doing that kind of thing
when you're twelve in the early twentieth century, then that
qualifies in my book.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Yeah, I was putting on like half a bottle of
Polo cologne and wandering around the mall. At this age,
I was.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
In the basement hiding from Satan.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
There you go. That's another thing to do. That's another
thing to do.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So the Hammonds were, like I said, they were all
pretty accomplished. Well, the mom was pretty accomplished, and all
his sisters would go on to do great things. His
sister Unis was a writer and a poet and edited
a poetry magazine. His sister Louise was a missionary in
China who would transcribe Christian hyndls and religious books in
Chinese and his sister Peggy was a musician. She was
(07:13):
a cellist, a world class cellist, but young Larry was
not inclined musically. When they went back to Evanston, Illinois,
he continued continued to sort of experiment and take things
apart and put him back together, and eventually he got
a little taste of success early on, when he was sixteen,
he had his first US patent with a kind of
(07:34):
a new and improved barometer that he ended up making
a few hundred books off of which you know, was
pretty good for a sixteen year old. And the nineteen
what is this twenties at this point, teens.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yeah, he would have been it would have been nineteen four,
nineteen nine, Okay, yeah, nineteen eleven, somewhere in there. All right,
So yeah, he ended up going on to car. I
don't think there was ever any question whether he was
going to or not, thanks to his mom and her
strong will about education and work ethic and he ended
(08:08):
up at Cornell in Ithaca, and apparently, according to the
Larry Hammond legend, he finally kind of came to understand
his own maybe mission in life, if not brilliant. From
when I read you had a bit of an ego
here or there, although he was generally a good guy.
This story kind of jibes.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
I've never known any genius inventors to have large egos, right,
It's unusual.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Usually very meek and they hide in the basement from
Satan too.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
But the night before exams, he and his friends went
out to Syracuse and were drinking, drinking, drinking, and caught
the last train back to Ithaca. And when they got
to class, they were still kind of drunk, and Larry
Hammond wandered into the wrong class. Did he not what
happened after that, Chuck?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Well, apparently he went in on exam day to an
electrical engineering class that he wasn't even taking an ACE
the final or ace the exam.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
I don't know if it was a final.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
And I think, like you said, as the legend goes,
that's when he was like, huh, I'm a pretty smart
guy and I am good at inventing things, and so that's.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
What I'm going to dedicate my life to.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Yeah, he's not only that he was going to be
an independent inventor. That is that's a life choice.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Right there, Oh right, like not going to work for
ge or Westinghouse or whatever.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Right, and he didn't. He ended up going somewhere I
don't remember where. He had a couple of jobs for sure,
especially to start out. But the first thing he did
after Cornell was to go and list in World War One. Yeah,
and I think he was stationed in France for a
little while, was mistaken for a French deserter because his
French was so good. Another part of his legend took
(09:51):
a little story. But then after that he moved to
Detroit and he took a job. He became chief engineering
he's still very young, at a company made boat engines,
because remember he had spent a lot of his tweens
taking engines. Apart he could ace an electrical engineering final,
but he also was studying mechanical engineering at the time,
so it makes sense that he was working at a
(10:13):
company that made boat engines.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Yeah, and he it was called the Gray Motor Company.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
And apparently the guy he was working for was someone
that served with him an army and said, I think
it wasn't enough money or something, and under the table,
this guy paid him an extra three hundred bucks a
week that no one knew about, just to keep him
working on these boat engines. Man that he knew he
(10:39):
was that valuable and that he probably shouldn't be making
boat engines. So he greased the wheel, he greased the
palm a little bit, he greased the propeller.
Speaker 3 (10:48):
But remember he wanted to be an independent inventor. And
if you have the spirit of an inventor and the
ego of somebody who can ace an electrical exam without
taking the test, no amount of money is going to
make you satisfied spending your life making boat engines for
somebody else. So he struck out, and I think he
did it the spot.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Struck out as in failed like baseball, no.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
The other way around, like struck out on his own exactly,
just so people know. I think he was still working though,
and like at night, he was working on his own stuff.
So this was while he was working at the boat company,
from what I understand. But he came up with something
called the tickless clock, not ticklish clock, a tickless clock
(11:32):
that you couldn't hear tick because apparently that drove him crazy.
And I feel this guy. If you've ever had a
loud clock in the room with you while you're trying
to sleep, there's nothing else you can concentrate on except
the stupid ticking of that stupid clock. And Larry Hammond
felt the same way, so he invented one that didn't
make the ticking sound.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
That's right, and he was like, you know what, I'm
going to sell this idea. He sold that idea, made
some pretty good money on it, enough that he was
able to move to New York and open up his
own sort of invention factory, and he invented something there
that kind of was the beginning of what would end
up like informing his future career in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
And that was the synchronous motor.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
In America, at the time we were making this is
the early twenties, they were making the switch to sixty
herts from fifty herts. Westinghouse came along and they had
a lot of sway, obviously, and said, you know what,
this arc lighting system we have looks a lot better
at sixty herts. We need everything to be the same,
(12:38):
So United States, can we all move to sixty herts?
In the government said sure.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
Right, yeah, oh sorry, So sixty herts is sixty cycles
a second, and it's part of alternating current, which, as
we remember, won out the current wars because you can
send it over very long distances with very little loss
of of energy. Right. Yeah, So they switched over to
(13:04):
sixty cycles a second, and Hammond said, well, wait a minute,
that's that's precise. Like we're talking about a precise like
something is moving back and forth between the poles sixty
times a second, and we're talking about electrons. You can
set your watch by electrons basically. So his synchronous motor
plugged into that sixty cycle a second electrical current, and
(13:27):
it created a motion that spun just as reliably as
those electrons switch poles back and forth sixty times a second.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
And if you're thinking, I don't even know what this means, guys,
who cares? What this means is all of a sudden,
you can electrify things that were previously not electrified. Yeah, like, oh,
I don't know that tickless clock that you still had
to wind over and over, like every clock in the
world that you had to wind over and over.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
By the way, chuck, that tickless clock. The way it
was cliss is the motor was put into a soundproof box.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah, pretty easy, which.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
Means that you could also say it was a tick
in the box. Okay, So the synchronous motor though, this
was the fact that it was very precise, that it
was going to spin X number of times every second.
That was a really big deal because if you have
something that is that precise and that has is current,
(14:27):
is getting an electrical current that's keeping it that precise,
no matter what, you can do all sorts of things,
Like you said he had an electrical clock. You can
make little shutter spin in front of people's eyes without
them even realizing that they're spinning. All sorts of things
you can do with a synchronous motor, and that was
the basis of a lot of his inventions that followed.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
All right, I think that was a great little tease setup.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I'm sorry for teasing you everybody.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
No, I love it because people are going like, what
do you mean shutters in front of your eyes? Well,
we're gonna explain that right after this. We'll be right back,
(15:27):
all right. So Josh left a great little tease.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
Sorry.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I did mention that he started making these clocks, but
this next thing actually happened first because he did have
a lot of success with the Hammond Clock Company because
everyone was like these electric clocks are amazing. I don't
want to wind my clock ever again, and you don't
have to. But before he found success there, he invented,
basically invented three D movies in the silent era of
(15:52):
cinema insane.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
So remember from our stereogram, our magic Eye episode, Yeah,
this is perfect for this. It's basically the same stuff
going on around the same time. But he came up
with something called the tell aview, and you basically created
a film with two cameras set a little bit apart,
and now all of a sudden you've got two slightly
different perspectives of the same thing, which, as you remember
(16:16):
from our Stereograms episode, that I loves to turn into
depth and perspective. So then you project the movie onto
the screen using those two projectors, not overlapping, but alternating
very quickly between the right image and the left image
right image, left image. That sounds like a headache, and
it probably would be if it weren't for the viewers
(16:40):
that Hammond created that every seat had that you looked
at this movie through and when the left image was
up on the screen, a shutter closed over your right eye,
so all you could see was your left image. And
then the same thing for your right eye with the
right image, and this all happens so fast that your
(17:00):
brain didn't make note of it. All it saw were
two slightly different perspectives of the same thing and turned
it into what's called parallax depth based on your position
of where you're sitting and where you're viewing an object.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Amazing, And again, this is all possible because of that
synchredous motor which was spinning these two little things in
front of your eyeballs exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And that nuts. This was the twenties, and this guy
came up with three D and it worked really well.
It worked so well that people were a little put
off by it.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
I read an article from The Atlantic that was written
in nineteen forty, a profile of John Hammond. They said
that the movie, the one movie that he made, Hello Mars,
was so crystal clear that it says close ups of
love scenes were almost embarrassing, and you could see the
sweat on the actor's faces. So apparently it was distracting.
(17:52):
It was so realistic and so lifelike that nobody was
following the plot and they were maybe even a little
put off.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
All right, so this isn't working out as far as
being a great business idea. But he was like, you
know what, I still you know, I could make this
thing without those little spinny goggles. He said, I could
actually do it with colored lenses, these little cheap cardboard
things that you know, in thirty years everyone was going
to think is the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
And he did that.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
He created some for Zigfield himself and the Zigfield Follies,
which was the biggest show going in Vaudeville and New York.
He called this the shadow graph, and he had actors
standing behind a transparent screen and he backlit them with
red and a green light spaced a few feet apart,
and then projected their shadows on the screen. And when
you wore those three D glasses, it again created depth
(18:43):
and it looked like they were sort of leaping off
the screen. And Zigfield loved this one. He was like,
I'll pay you seventy five thousand dollars to use this
stuff for two years, which is about one point three
million bucks today.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
Do you know how many drachmas it is? How many
four hundred twenty million, five hundred and seventy eight four
plus drachmas today? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (19:06):
So I mean by this point he's he's rich, or
at the very least, he can use that money to
fund doing whatever he wants to do invention wise.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Being an independent inventor. He's realized his dream by this point.
That's right in the twenty so he was in his twenties. Still,
it's pretty great stuff. Yeah. Also, I saw that this
is the only effect that Zigfield used over two seasons.
Zigfield like to keep things fresh and cutting edge, but
he loved this, this the shadow graph so much that
he used it over two different seasons, which is kind
(19:36):
of an honor in and of itself.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Super cool.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
So let's get back to that synchronous motor, the sixty
cycle second that was so reliable you could never have
to wind a clock from it, right, all right, he Well,
let's go back even further than that, Chuck, Let's go
back to the eighteen nineties, which is the same year
Hammon was born, eighteen ninety five, and there's an American
inventor named that is Khill, who was the first person
(20:03):
to come up with an electro an electro mechanical not
strictly electronic, but it had some gears and stuff to it,
so it was electro mechanical. It's called the teleharmonium. And well,
let's go back even further than that, Chuck, okay to
the eighteen sixties, and we're going to hop on over
to Germany.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
All right, I'm picking up what you're laying down. There
was a German scientist named Hermann von Helmholtz.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
And he.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
He knew music a little bit, and he's like, here's
one thing I know is that when you hear a
musical note, it's a sound way that you're hearing vibrating
at a frequency, like if you hear an a key
on a piano, it's vibrating at a very specific frequency
that makes the sound of what you would call an
a note. But here's the deal, he said, it sounds
(20:54):
more than an a note. It's very warm and there's
depth to it. And he figured out what you're hearing
is called a harmonic, which is, you know, when one
thing vibrates, things near it are also activated and maybe
vibrate a little bit, and these little background frequencies vibrating
along with that a note create this richer, fuller sound
called the harmonic.
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah, so, Hemholtz. This big contribution in the eighteen sixties
is to chart all of these harmonics. Yeah, so from
what I understand, then he would go through and say
an a on a cello has all these accompanying vibrations,
and a on a violin has all these different vibrations
and wrote them out as frequencies. Right, So he created
(21:36):
a scientific mathematic roadmap to recreating those frequencies using something
other than a cello or other than a violin. If
you have that information and you can reproduce those frequencies together,
they will make an artificial sound of a violin or
an artificial sound of a cello. This is what Helmholtz contributed,
(21:59):
which is pretty significe to kill.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
All right, So back to k Hill again.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
He was the American inventor who invented the first electro mechanical.
I don't even think you said musical instrument?
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Did I just stop with electro mechanical? Yeah? Man, what sloppy.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
That was called now you're not, You're great. That's called
the That was called the telehrmonium. And he created something
called the tone wheel, and it was you really should
look it up. It's kind of hard to describe. It's
this this very large disc shaped motor. It has cogs
and when you spin that rotor that working with a magnet,
like you know, the same way you would with an
(22:35):
electric guitar. Pickup the cogs passed through a magnetic field
by this coiled copper wire around the magnet, and if
you spin it at a steady pace, it's going to
generate a very specific frequency, an electrical frequency, And if
you amplify that, that's where you're going to finally hear
that musical tone come out that Hemholtz was talking about
(22:57):
so many years earlier.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Yeah, so what if you have say four hundred cogs
on this tone wheel, and they passed through the electrical
field four hundred times a second, it makes one full
revolution per second, it will generate a current with a
frequency of four hundred hertz, and that is the same
frequency as an A four note. So what K. Hills
(23:20):
has just done is create a way to reproduce that
a four note or any note you want to if
you can figure out what the frequency is thanks to Hemholtz,
and then build a coog that has that number of
little prongs or something on it thanks to K. Hill.
Speaker 2 (23:40):
Right, So what he did, like we mentioned, was create
that teleharmonium, which was sort of like you said, the
very first.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Electro mechanical instrument. But it was a problem because it
was huge.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
It weighed two hundred tons, it costs what would be
seven million dollars today, and it was the size of
a huge train car.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Two point two billion drachmas.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
So obviously this thing's not going to sell. Nobody's interested
in a telharmonium. But that really set the stage for
Larry Hammond's work.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
Definitely so. And that's a really important point for inventors
to whenever you talk about an inventor, very very rare
that somebody comes up with a full idea from scratch,
you know, they stand on the shoulders of giants. They
always say, that's what Hammond did. He was the first
person to figure out how to make this stuff practical,
and he had the wit and the brains and the
(24:34):
interest to make it happen. And so after k Hill
basically gave up because he created a seven million dollars
two hundred ton train car of a electro mechanical instrument,
Hammond's was like, I'm going to pick this up. I
never saw Chuck if he knew about k Hill's invention,
or how he knew about k Hill's invention, or if
(24:56):
he was inspired by Kle I'm not sure. I think
that it was who. I don't know, but he basically
took the tone wheel. However, he heard about it, and
he figured out how to make it much smaller, much
more practical. Rather than the size of like a huge cylinder,
it was a size about a silver dollar. And when
you get something that is that useful down to that size,
(25:18):
you can put a bunch of them together and do
some really amazing stuff. And that's what he did. That
was the basis of the Hammond organ That's right.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
It didn't initially start out that way though. He had been,
like I said, selling a lot of electric clocks, was
making pretty good money doing that, but then everybody started
making electric clocks and his company wasn't as valuable all
of a sudden. And I don't think we mentioned that
he was. He was an independent adventure but he wanted
to put people to work, like he was very proud
(25:47):
of supplying jobs to people. And he always wanted to
have like his successful company, you know, certainly to enrich himself,
but also so he could so he could put people
to work. I mean, this was a lot of this
stuff was during the depression. A lot of his work
was so he's really proud of putting Americans to work.
And I think Hammond eventually ended up having like three
thousand employees when the organ was at its peak, which
(26:10):
was a really big deal to him.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
But the clock is slowing down, not literally.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
The business was though, and he was a little nervous
about what to do to keep the doors open. So
he initially thought of this tiny tone wheel thing to
just make like a sound, and like, hey, it can
be a gimmick, a little gadget and you can have
this little tone wheel and plug it in and it
makes a sound and kids will love it, almost like
a toy. But he had a assistant treasurer at Hammond
(26:41):
that was a church organist, and the organist was like, man,
you should make an organ. Like if you can make
one sound, you can make a lot of them. And
apparently Hammond loved the sound of a pipe organ, and
that was it. He had the other thing, which was
kind of funny that he was making a lot of
money on there also when away was this auto dealing
(27:03):
bridge table. It was a bridge table that under the
table had a little mechanical system that shuffled and dealt
cards literally under the table to each player, and he
sold fourteen thousand of those wow in two years.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
But then everyone got tired of that.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
So he was always looking for the next thing to
keep the doors open, and this, like, let's replicate a
pipe organ, was the next big thing.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Yeah. One other thing about him. As a boss too
and a company owner, he was smart enough to surround
himself with other very smart engineers, and in particular is
a guy named John Hannert who basically co created the
Hammond organ with Hammond. I almost have the impression that
of the two, Hammond was the idea guy and Hannert
(27:49):
was the one who figured out how to do it.
But when you put them together, what they did was
they took these tone wheels and at the behest of
the organ, playing treasurer at the Hammond company realized that
if you took ninety one of them, you could essentially
reproduce all the sounds that a pipe organ could make,
(28:11):
which is really something because a pipe organ can make
quite a bit of very rich sounds, a lot of
different sounds. That's kind of the point of a pipe organ.
I didn't realize until researching this is that it's meant
to not only just sound like an organ, but it's
also meant to mimic other instruments, and it does that
by mimicking the timber of a different thing. A timber
(28:33):
is like like you were talking about, where if you
play an A on a piano, it sounds different than
an A on a cello. Well, the difference is timber.
And if you can again figure out the harmonics surrounding
that note, you can recreate what it sounds like on
a piano in a or an A on a cello
and that pipe. Organs were able to do this. They
(28:53):
did it using compressed air mechanical stuff. John Hammon was
the one who's like, I can take one of these
giant things and size it down and make this whole
The same thing happen with electronics.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Yeah, it's like you know today, if you go buy
a cassio keyboard, it's going to say, you know, horns, strings, right, flute, trumpet,
guitar and those things never sound. Strings do a pretty
good job, but you know when you hit the if
you play a series of horns, you're not going to
(29:25):
say like, oh my gosh, is they're a mariachi band
in here. It approximates the sound in a fun and
useful way.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Even the samba beat's not going to dress that up
enough to pass muster, but you're right.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
At the very least, this was like a big deal.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Pipeworkins could do it to get different sounds that would
you know, like this is a flute or an organ
version of a flute.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Essentially, Yeah, they're called those were the stops. Like you
would pull a stop to let a rank or timber
of pipes play. You could close the stop to keep
that one from playing and allow other ones to play.
One of Hammon's big breakthroughs was to figure out how
to do that again electronically.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Like, if you've ever seen a pipe organ up close,
they have these little round knobs and that's called the
stop knob, and it's either on or off, and you
pull it in or pull it out, and that's letting
compressed pressurized air in or out to change the sound.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
I saw that. That's where the term the phrase pulling
out all the stops comes from. When you have all
the stops open, all the type are playing at the
same time, which is yeah, pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
So Hammond figures all this out. He gets a piano guts.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
It installs platinum switches, installs eight and a half miles
of wiring, installs hundreds of transistors, and they are spinning
these tiny tone wheel motors when you press a key,
and it's it's pretty ingenious. So all of a sudden,
he's electrified this thing, even though he doesn't play a
musical instrument, and he's instead of using these these mechanical stops,
(30:57):
he has these these switches called tone bars. So if
you ever see a Hammon organ and you see above
the keys there kind of where the stop knobs are
in an organ, they're these little little bars that you
can just pull in or out and it has the
same effect basically. And you know, depending on who you are,
(31:17):
you might have your favorite tone bar settings for different songs.
I think the classic, like Jimmy Smith was this guy
that was sort of really popularized at jazz organ and
everyone knows like this is the Jimmy Smith setting. Like
if you go to YouTube and you're talking about different
tone bar settings, they'd be like, oh, yeah, Jimmy Smith
pulled all three of these on the left out and
(31:38):
that was his setting, and you can replicate this stuff.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, So One of the things that Hammond was interested
in doing too, was rather than say, you know, make
this combination and it's the strings, or make this combination
it's the flute. Yeah, he left it up to the person.
So like those those stops would have to do with
like attack and decay, like how fast the sound started
(32:02):
and how long it took to finally like go silent again.
These were like what the sound bars were doing. It
wasn't like, oh, I'll press this button and now it's
a string and the reason why I did that. He'd
likened it in an interview. I saw to how like
a true painter would never buy a flesh pink paint.
They would they would buy a red paint and a
(32:23):
white paint, and you know, orange paint and green paint,
but like they would make their own paint. He was saying,
like his ham and organ allows an organist to create
their own sounds by putting together this basic stuff and
creating something incredibly rich. And in fact, I think they
calculated that there were two hundred and fifty three million
(32:45):
possible tonal variations that you could come up with with
the Hammond Organ.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Amazing. That's from thirty eight drawbars really really cool. Yeah,
for sure, should we take a breaker now, I was
gonna say we should probably take a break.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Yeah, yeah, all right, let's do it. So Hammond's Organs
(33:33):
took off really quickly. I think he sold fourteen hundred
or something like that the first year. Imagine that, chuck. Yeah,
it's a lot so and I think they were originally
about thirty thousand dollars today. I don't know how many drakmas,
but they were twelve hundred and fifty dollars in the
thirties the mid thirties, and it's a lot of money.
(33:54):
Like you had to be wealthy, and you had to
be really into music, or you had to have a
church that was kind of wealthy to afford it. But
that's who he marketed to, serious musicians, home musicians, professional musicians,
but also churches more than anything. And it worked. Like
you sold fourteen in the first year.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yeah, George Gershwin supposedly the first person to buy one,
even though Henry Ford said he wanted the first six.
But as the story goes, George Gershwan got the first.
He's selling to a like you said, a lot of churches.
I think what was the number, like by nineteen sixty five,
more than fifty thousand churches had Hammond organs. By nineteen
(34:38):
thirty eight there were one thousand churches, but also baseball stadium.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
So if you've ever been to a baseball.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Stadium, they play those Hammond organs radio soap operas very
early on, you know started you know, if you remember
like the dramatic music of us So on the radio,
that was an organ, a Hammond organ. So nineteen thirty six,
this is just one year into the Hammond organ. Things
are really really doing well. And the pipe organ industry
(35:06):
starts complaining to the FTC and they're like, this guy
is out there making all these claims about how you
can replicate every sound on a pipe organ, how it
sounds the same as a ten thousand dollars pipe organ,
and like these are false claims and he can't say
that stuff. So the FTC started snooping around and they said,
(35:28):
you know what, you can't make these claims. You can't
say that stuff in your ads, and we're going to
give you a cease and desist letter that says like
what you can and can't say. And Hammond says, you
know what we should do, We should have a blind
listening test of it's like a John Henry thing, like
my little I think it was a twenty six hundred
(35:50):
dollars organ that he used and a seventy five thousand
dollars pipe organ and let's go head to head and
have experts listen in and say what they think.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Yeah, so that's what they staged I think, I think
in nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, well I think that happened in thirty seven, but
this had been he'd been fighting with the FTC for
a while at that point.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
Okay, so yeah, that was exactly the kind of guy
he was. He would he was exactly the kind of
person to come up with a blind listening test to
settle things with the FTC. You know, that's not how
the FTC did things, but John Hammond kind of made
them do it that way. And it was really really
risky because he he would have been essentially guilty of
(36:28):
unfair business practices and that could have all sorts of
terrible effects. But from what I saw that they weren't
going to let him use the name or the word
organ for his instrument anymore. H Really, I'm guessing that
that would have had a pretty big damper on business
as well. So he had a lot riding on this
blind test, and it was very mavericky to suggest it
(36:49):
in the first place. But in nineteen thirty seven at
the University of Chicago Chapel they went head to head.
They hid speakers, Hammond speakers among the pipes, and put
both the organ, the hammin organ and the pipe organ
behind screens, and they had thirty different little pieces of
music and each one played fifteen, and that panel of
(37:13):
judges that you mentioned, they marked down which of those
thirty they thought had played it the pipe organ or
the hammin organ.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Yeah, and these were professional musicians judging. I think there
were nine of them. Most of them were organists, of course.
And then he also had fifteen college students, and he
ended up basically winning. I think they I saw different
numbers of how much they were correctly identifying. They were
(37:42):
wrong a third of the time. I saw they were
wrong half of the time. At the end of the day,
what happened was the FTC said, and this is nineteen
thirty eight by this point, so this thing's dragging out.
They said, all right, here's a new season dissorder. You
can't say it can reproduce a ten thousand dollars organ
because they could tell the difference there. But you know,
(38:03):
they did find that produced like other words that were using,
was that it sounded real, that it was produced fine music,
that it produced beautiful music. And he was able to
use this wordage and all his ads moving forward, which
he took as a big victory.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Yeah, oh for sure. And I believe it was out
of that battle where they calculated the two hundred and
fifty three million different tonal sounds. Oh interesting, And I
believe they started using that for marketing too, because if
you ask me, if I'm just an ordinary Joe, two
hundred and fifty three million different tones and makes the
(38:40):
as good a sound as a pipe organ, I'm gonna
be more wowed by the two hundred and fifty three
million tones, even though the pipe organ makes three hundred
million different tones, because the pipe organ people aren't out
there marketing to me like that.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
And John Hammond is so if you're a Joe keyboardist, yeah,
you see the value in this thing, for sure.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Everyone talked about Joe the plumber. No one ever talked
about Joe the keeper.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Oh man, I forgot about Joe the Plumber.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Good lord, is that Sarah Palin?
Speaker 3 (39:08):
I don't remember. I don't remember. But if you're going
to make a movie about the two thousand aughtsright, having
him like somewhere in the background would really be a
nice touch. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
And Soybomb?
Speaker 3 (39:22):
What was that?
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Soybomb was the guy who rushed the stage and I
think it was a Grammy's during Bob Dylan's acceptance speech.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Oh really, I don't remember that at all.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
And he had a shirt on this said Soybomb.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
No, I don't remember that.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah, I can't remember the year, and I'm sure I
got some of that wrong, but Soybomb and it was right.
Speaker 3 (39:38):
It wasn't Bob Dylan. It was Bob Newhart, that's right.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
When he went was Grammy? All right?
Speaker 2 (39:44):
So he's backtilling these organs again. Famous people are using him.
Baseball team stadiums are using him. Soap operas and churches.
Everyone's getting on board. A woman comes along by the
name of Ethel Smith, who probably did more to popularize
the Hammond or than anybody else.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
She was in a movie, a Red.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Skelt movie called Bathing Beauty and played this song, and
it's on YouTube. You should check it out. Ladies got
crazy fingers. She's so fast, And it was like a
Brazilian kind of song called Tico Tico that became a
smash international musical sensation.
Speaker 3 (40:20):
Yes, and Ethel Smith was she kind of idolized John
Hammond because she realized what he had done by creating
this Hammond organ, and so it was kind of symbiotic.
Even though she didn't meet him until much later, but
she always kind of idolized him and was very grateful
to him. Yeah, because you know, without her or without him,
(40:41):
she said, she would have probably gotten into an older
profession than music, right what she meant. And then without her,
his his organ just wouldn't have been as well known.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I think, yeah, absolutely, that song was huge.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
Also, Jimmy Smith, the afore mentioned no relation to Ethel
jazz musician, even though people before him used it, he
really kind of took it to a new level. And
then we have to talk about because I know there
are keyboard players and Hammond enthusiasts. They're like, guys, you
can't talk about the ham and organ without talking about
the Leslie speaker. Yeah, if you've ever been to a show,
(41:20):
a concert and you've seen a ham and Organ. I
almost guarantee you that sitting beside that organ is this
giant brown wooden box that doesn't even look like a
speaker because it doesn't have a big, round, graded panel
like most speakers do. And you might be thinking, what
in the world is that thing? Even that is called
a Leslie speaker and it is the key I think
(41:44):
to and many people agree to what makes the Hamm
and Organ sound so amazing?
Speaker 3 (41:48):
Yeah, and Don Leslie was like, Hey, I came up
with this speaker that works really well with your organ
and makes it sound a lot better. Can I come
work for you or do you want to buy my idea?
And remember I said at the outset that Hammond was
kind of egotistical here or there, and he was also
I think you said, tone deaf. And apparently when you
put those two things together, he wasn't at all impressed
(42:10):
with Leslie's invention because he couldn't hear any difference. And
he also, I think didn't really like somebody telling him
that they had come up with something that improved on
his invention totally. So for decades there was a almost
a one sided cold war between the Hammond Company, or
specifically I think I called him John Hammond, Larry Hammond
(42:33):
and Don Leslie and Leslie's company. He's had no expense.
He would he would not entertain the idea of using
these Leslie speakers in his organs. He wouldn't let anybody
else do it. But they worked so well, Chuck, that
if you were a Hammond dealer, an authorized Hammond dealer,
you would secretly like if somebody came in and bought
(42:56):
a B three from you, you'd be like, let me
show you something in the back, and you'd take them
back there. You'd be like, you really have to have
this because it makes it so much better.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah. He would even change the switches out from year
to year so you couldn't use it like you had
to modify it basically to use with a B Leslie.
So the Leslie is really interesting. It's probably we should
do a short stuff on it. But the secret to
the Leslie is it's also electro mechanical because it takes
your sound and instead of just pumping it out like
(43:26):
a regular speaker, it shoots the sound in two directions.
It shoots it down to a base speaker that is
literally rotating, and shoots it up to these two cones.
They look like sort of like the old ear cones
that you would put to your ear to hear somebody
better if you are hard of hearing. That were on
what looks like kind of like a record turntable, and
(43:49):
these things spin and it would shoot the sound toward that,
and the sound would spin through these spinning cones and
come out the other side through the speaker. It did,
you know, it's not like it didn't have any venting
for sound. It had these little slits at the top,
but not like a big, huge round hole yah.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
And it was a belt driven.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Thing by a motor, and these things would spin and
it was a variable speed, so if you had it
really really slow, it was sort of a warble. If
you spun it really really fast, it's that sound of
classic rock that you know and love, or just rock
and roll. If you hear a key pressed with that
Leslie speaker spinning at top speed, it's that vibrato that
(44:35):
instead of just the ware, and it makes an organ
sound flat by comparison when you're not using one, I'll bet,
and really just brings it alive in a small space. So,
you know, a pipe organ one of the reasons a
pipe organ sounds great is because it's used in a cathedral.
If you're in your basement and you can't replicate a
(44:55):
really great sound, this Leslie really aids in that.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
The other thing it does as it serves as an
alternate portal to Narnia. Once it gets spinning really fast,
tears open the fabric of time and space.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yeah, so hats off to Don Leslie. You know, just
a genius invention to go hand in hand, and I
wish Larry Hammond had embraced it, but.
Speaker 3 (45:17):
Oh he did not.
Speaker 1 (45:19):
Yeah, the ego got in the way.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I think even after he retired he tried to prevent
the company from from doing business with hand with Leslie. Yeah. Yeah,
basically right when he died, they started adding Leslie speakers
to their setups. It's pretty cool. So Larry Hammond, I
think I said John again. If I did, I'm sorry everybody.
(45:43):
I'm just gonna move forward. But he's he was more
than just the ham and organ inventor and the tickless clock,
the tick in the box clock inventor, or the automatic
bridge table inventor. He did all sorts of other stuff too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
He then probably the first synthesizer it's called the novachord.
It's you should watch youtubes of this thing if you're
into musical instruments like old time Ewins's.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
This was in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Robert Mogue was a five year old who you know,
gets credited as being the synthesizer inventor, so he invitted
the novachord.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
He invented all kinds of great stuff. I think he died.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
After his death, he ended up with one hundred and
ten patents to his name. CBS bought he died in
nineteen seventy three. CBS had bought Hammond in nineteen sixty five.
They had also bought the Fender guitar company, so that's
when CBS thought it was in the music instrument business
for a little while. Hammond bought it back in nineteen
(46:44):
eighty from CBS. In eighty five they went out of business.
So like the last true Hammond B three I think
rolled off the line in those years and there I
think they made a couple of million organs. So it's
not like if you want to and B three organ
you can find them today. It's they aren't cheap, but
it's not like some huge rare collector item.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
One other thing I thought I thought was noteworthy, Chuck
a while back, you talked about how he was, like,
you know, a good boss, and he was very proud
of employing people. Two different presidents of the ham and
Company started out at the bottom. One is an office
boy and one in the mailroom and worked their way up.
That's I mean, just having one president having done that
(47:28):
is pretty impressive, but two is really significant. And really
I think it says a lot about the kind of
company he built totally.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Suzuki, by the way, as a PostScript, bought Hammond in
nineteen eighty nine, right Suzuki of the motorcycle keyboard fame. Sure,
And in two thousand and two they started making a
new version of the B three again. I think it's
called the x K three. And I listened to a comparison.
I'm sure where players I purists will say like, no, man,
(48:02):
you gotta have the original Hammond.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
But it sounded just like it to me. It's a
little brighter.
Speaker 3 (48:08):
Maybe they need to set up a blind listening test.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
We should have at the Rockefeller Cathedral in Chicago. But uh, anyway,
that XK three, it sounded pretty good to me. Cool
for my dumb semi musical year.
Speaker 3 (48:22):
Uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (48:24):
I got nothing else. I enjoy these.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
We'll have to.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
I don't think we've done one of Mog yet, have we?
Speaker 3 (48:29):
I don't think so you keep saying Mogue. It's very
clearly Moog it's mo I don't know.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
But uh we should. We should do him one day.
I love I love covering these sort of pioneers and
musical invention.
Speaker 3 (48:41):
Yeah, it's it's a good little sweet we're building. Okay, agreed,
A sweet sweet, So Chuck said, sweet sweet everybody, And
as longtime listeners know that just unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 2 (48:55):
I'm gonna call this quick correction. Hey, guys, love the show,
Thanks for tech the hard stuff. A quick correction from
the zenobiotics episode, Josh says during the explanation of p
fas that they get into the municipal wastewater and we
have no idea how to get them out of our water.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
That isn't true.
Speaker 2 (49:13):
Granular activated carbon and reverse osmosis are two ways to
remove p fas from water. Lots of drinking water treatment
systems are currently using this technology as we speak to
remove p fasts, not saying they're an expensive and difficult
to manage, but they do exist.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
Keep up the great work, Whitney B.
Speaker 3 (49:31):
Thanks a lot, Whitney B. With that bit of good news,
I'm glad we can get p fasts out of our water. Yes.
If you want to be like Whitney B and say
listen to me, you can send it in an email
to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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