A FORGOTTEN CHAPTER IN KEYBOARD-INSTRUMENT

HISTORY -- THE (HAMMOND) 'NOVACHORD'

IVOR DARREG

Earlier in the 1930's, the Hammond Company of Chicago put on the market a new kind of organ which became enormously successful because of high-powered persistent advertising and astute financial management. It was not electronic but electromechanical in its tone-production because1 although it did use electronic vacuum-tube amplifiers and in later models some electronic accessories, the tones were generated by a very reliable gear-wheel mechanism whose pitches were determined by the frequency of the AC power-line and the ratios of the gearing used. As long as the Power Company supplied the same current, the Hammond organ could not get out of tune. This idea was no doubt suggested by the fact that the Hammond Co. had been making electric clocks (the old analog kind with a synchronous motor and wa.tchnaker-style gears inside, not today's really electronic Digital Clocks) use such clock-motors as Generators, and tones can be produced. As recounted in a number of publications, the idea of music by alternating-current generators harks back to Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium in the early 1900s.

Cahill didn't have vacuum-tube amplifiers, but by the thirties, they were quite good and loud enough, so that made the electric-clock-as-generator practical where Cahill's dream wasn't Commercial enough.

Nore about that famous organ some other time, but we must establish tbe basis the Hammond Co. had for supposing that what they did to replace the pipe organ might later help develop a gizmo to replace the Piano.

Back to the Drawing-Board! During the 1930's, radio sets using vacuum tubes reached a high stage of development proving that tubes could generate currents alternating millions of times per second, so using thena to make audible frequencies was much easier. Also, they could generate and/or modify timbres in a way that was next to impossible with a gear-wheel mechanism. Theoretically possible with gear-wheels, but financially out of the question. Now affordable with tubes. Something else becamc affordable--what today is called Attack and Decay. Pianos, harpsichords, clavichords, guitars, and percussion instruments have their individual ways of beginning and ending their vibrations. Vacuum-tube circuits can do this; so can the modern semiconductor devices, as you have heard!

Thus the Hammond "Novachord" (evidently derived from Latin Novus, meaning new, and the Greek-derived "chord" meaning "string" used in the instrument-names clavichord and harpsichord) could come near to piano tone, and closer to harpsichord tone, where their organ could not.

It can then be considered the forerunner of today's synthesizers and similar electronic keyboards. It weighed too much, and took up several times the space of today's keyboards, most of which are quite portable. But for the year 1939, when it hit the market, it was quite modern. Soon World War II stopped the building and selling of instrunents like that, and it never really recovered from the shock. By the late 1940's, competing electronic organs had better timbres than the Hammond organ, (because they used tubes) and then along came transistors and other semiconductors, permitting further refinements, and last came digital circuits developed for computers.

The Musical Establishment, rooted in the 19th century, offered intense opposition to the Novachord, which was almost as bad as the War in killing it off. Obviously the Piano Manufacturers didn't like the Novachord either.