
Laurens Hammond, inventor of the Hammond Organ, was born 126 years ago today.
An engineer and inventor, Hammond’s inventions include not only the Hammond organ, but the Hammond clock and the world's first polyphonic musical synthesizer, the Novachord.
Born in Evanston, Illinois, to William Andrew and Idea Louise Strong Hammond, Hammond showed great technical prowess from an early age. His father, William, took his own life in 1898, ostensibly due to the pressures of running the First National Bank, which he had founded.
Upon her husband's death, Idea, who was an artist, relocated to France with Laurens to further her studies. It was during their stay in France that Laurens began developing many of his early inventions. When the family returned to Evanston, Laurens, then 14, was as fluent in French and German as he was in his native tongue.
By this time, he had already designed a system for automatic transmission for automobiles. At his mother's suggestion, he submitted his designs to engineers at French automaker, Renault, only to be rejected. Hammond studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University, and was a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He graduated with honors in 1916.
After World War I, Hammond moved to Detroit, where he was chief engineer for the Gray Motor Company, a manufacturer of marine engines. A partner in the company, Col. John H. Poole, with whom Hammond had served in the war in France, knew of his engineering skills, and paid him an extra $300 a week under the table to stay with Gray Motor.
In 1919, Hammond invented a silent spring-driven clock. This invention brought him enough money to leave Gray Motor Company and rent his own space in New York City. In 1922, Hammond invented the Teleview system of shutter glasses in association with 3D films. One feature was made for the system, a film called Radio-Mania.
Hammond premiered his show at the Selwyn Theatre in New York in December, 1922 to critical acclaim, but the cost of installing the expensive machinery in the theater killed the project. In 1928, Hammond founded the Hammond Clock Company, after designing a synchronous clock motor that was inspired by Henry Warren's Telechrons, but was not self-starting. These clocks were still popular in Britain in the 1960s, because they would not display a false time.
Hammond's clock business ran into difficulties in the early 1930s, and he struggled to save it with a number of other inventions, such as an electric bridge table and, slightly later, his famous organ.
In 1933, he bought a used piano, and proceeded to discard everything apart from the keyboard action. Using the keyboard as a controller, he was able to experiment with various sound-generating methods until he found the best one — the tonewheel generator.
The company's assistant treasurer, W. L. Lahey, was the organist at the nearby St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, and Hammond consulted him concerning the quality of the new instrument's sound. Thanks to Hammond's prior manufacturing and engineering experience, the tonewheel generator was extremely well-engineered by the time the organ finally went into production.
The number of tonewheel organs still in regular use in the 21st century is a testament to the quality of the design and execution of the product. Hammond filed his patent application on January 19, 1934. At that time, unemployment was a major problem due to the Great Depression, and with this in mind, the Patent Office rushed to grant Hammond's application, with the hope of creating jobs in the area.
In 1954, the famous B-3 organ was introduced with the addition of a harmonic percussion feature. Many players preferred to play the B-3 through a rotating speaker cabinet known, after several name changes, as a Leslie speaker, after its inventor Donald J. Leslie. The Leslie system is an integrated speaker/amplifier combination in which sound is emitted by a rotating horn over a stationary treble compression driver, and a rotating baffle beneath a stationary bass woofer.
This creates a characteristic sound because of the constantly changing pitch shifts that result from the Doppler effect created by the moving sound sources. Leslie initially tried to sell his invention to Laurens Hammond, but Hammond was unimpressed and declined to purchase it.
Hammond modified his interface connectors to be "Leslie-proof," but Leslie quickly engineered a workaround. The Leslie company was sold to CBS in 1965 and was finally bought by Hammond in 1980. Hammond-Suzuki acquired the rights to Leslie in 1992, which continues to make the original 122 speakers and a variety of other products.
Laurens Hammond was awarded the Franklin Institute's John Price Wetherill Medal in 1940 for the invention of the Hammond electric organ. Hammond left his position as president of his company in 1955, to allow himself more time to concentrate on researching and developing new ideas. On February 12, 1960, at the age of sixty-five, he retired.
At the time of his retirement in 1960, he held ninety patents. He would be granted another twenty before his death at age 78 in 1973.