HISTORY PAGE |
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How It All Started: If there is one man who can lay claim to the title "Father of the Theatre Organ" it must surely be Robert Hope-Jones. He was the English inventor whose ideas inspired the design of the mighty Wurlitzer. He was born in 1859 in a village called Hooton Grange, on the Wirral, in North West England. He was a gifted church organist, even in his childhood - playing the church organ for services at the age of nine. He became Chief Electrician at a telephone company, and with his knowledge of low voltage relay circuits, gave birth to the use of electro-mechanical relay circuits in organ building. He started designing and inventing new technology, and rebuilt two organs. Finally he gave up his job with the telephone company, to devote himself full time to the development of theatre organs. He then started a succession of companies which failed, due to his insistence on rigid adherence to specifications. In 1903 he and his wife left Britain hurriedly for the USA, after being unable to raise any more finance for his failed companies. In 1907 he set up a company in Elmira, which by 1909 had become very successful on the manufacturing side. But again Hope-Jones's strict adherence to specifications proved too costly and the company failed. However, Hope-Jones's expertise had never gone unnoticed, and the Wurlitzer company of Tonawanda offered to him an executive position, which he accepted. Wurlitzer then began the successful manufacture of cinema and theatre organs using Robert Hope-Jones's design ideas. These included the now familiar stop tabs in the colours: white for flutes, tibias and diapasons etc. red for reeds, yellow for strings and black for couplers. The tabs themselves were another of Hope-Jones's genius ideas: he first made the prototypes by slicing the bone handles of kitchen knives and cementing them to the stop key switches. But, once again his rigid demands got him into trouble and eventually he was forbidden to enter the factory. Totally demoralised, he ended his life in a rented hotel room on the 12th of September 1914. It goes without saying that Robert Hope-Jones's ingenious ideas and inventions set the groundwork and patterns for the electronic theatre organs and keyboards of today.
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