The ‘Fotosonor’. La Société Française électro-musicale, France. 1955.

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The ‘Fotosonor’ was a photo-electrical organ built in France during the 1950s and was designed to replace a traditional pipe organ liturgical music. Several models of the instrument were built;

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fotosonor_chasis
The moveable tone units and amplifier of the Fotosonor Choir Organ

The ‘Choir Organ’ was a large traditional wooden panelled , two manual church organ. This modular version had up to eleven optical tone units – each unit reproduced the sound of a traditional organ; Drone, Flutes, Trumpets and so-on. The large tone units were housed in a separate moveable cabinet so that only the ‘traditional’ keyboard part of the instrument was visible.

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The two unit Fotosonor ‘Quatre Jeux’

The ‘Deux Jeux’ and Quatre Jeux’ were of a more modern metal-clad design each with two or four tone units respectively. In this design the tone units were integrated into the keyboard part of the instrument alongside an amplifier and loudspeaker system. The manufacturers also suggest that a turntable “…can be easily incorporated to accompany the organ, allowing the study of liturgical works in general; particularly Gregorian chant, choral singing hymns”

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The four unit ‘Quatre Jeux’

The pipe-organ sound of the Fotosonor was generated using a photo-electrical technique; rotating glass discs printed with looped sound-waves interrupted a light beam trained on a photo-electrical cell thereby generating a reproduction of the tone ‘recorded’ on the disc. This had the added benefit of the organist being able to ‘update’ the instrument with optical recordings of new sounds.


 

Sources

‘Fotosonor’ Promotional booklet. La Société Française Electro-musicale. 23 Rue Lamartine, Paris 9.

Minshall Organs. Burton Minshall, Canada/USA. 1946

Minshall Organ
‘Mt Vernon’ Minshall Organ

The Minshall range of electronic Organs were designed by the ex-radio repairman Burton Minshall (Born; Dereham Township, Oxford, Ontario, Canada 9th aug 1907 . Died; 10 Feb 1957 aged 49 ).  These electronic tube organs were an early post war design – targeting a new and affluent US middle class and competing with tone wheel, pipe and reed based organs. Numerous electronic organs were produced during the 1950s in what became a fiercely competitive market, eventually dominated by companies such as Hammond, Conn and Gulbranson (who in turn were forced out by heavy competition from Japanese integrated circuit designs in the 1960s).

minshall_01 copy

Minshall’s design was originally intended  as a home build project. This first amateur design eventually lead to the establishment of a successful organ manufacturing company selling mainly to churches and funeral parlours as well as the home organ market.

Minshall’s original plant in Ontario Canada moved in 1946 to Brattleboro, Vermont USA due to the proximity of Estey Organ Co – a well known and established manufacturer of reed organs. In 1947 Minshall’s company merged with Estey to form ‘Minshall-Estey Organ Inc’ where they continued to produce electronic organs based ion Minshall’s designs until 1954 when Minshall severed ties with Estey.

The Minshall company finally came to an end in 1955; Burton Minshall became ill, sold all of his shares in the company and eventually died in 1957.

Vacuum tubes of the MNinshall OPrgan
Tone generator cabinet showing the vacuum tubes and speakers of the Minshall Organ (image copyright Swartko)

The Instruments produced sound using 52 vacuum tubes mostly 12AU7s or 12AX7s – using 3 tubes per tone generator, one as a phase shift oscillator and five sections as RC frequency dividers. The Minshall Organs, which were considerably cheaper than similar competing models, had a reputation for unreliability and problems with pitch drifting of the overheating tubes.

 Minshall Sales Brochure

Article from ‘Mechanix Illustrated’. May 1954.


Sources:

‘Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America’. By Dennis G. Waring

‘Mechanix Illustrated’ Magazine. May 1954. H.W.Kellick

the ‘Clavier à Lampe’ (1927), ‘Automatic Electrical Musical Instrument’ (1929) and ‘Orgue Radioélectrique’. Joseph Armand Marie Givelet, France. 1927.

Armand Givelet behind the early monophonic Clavier a Lampe: “Les premiers essais de musique radio-électrique avec clavier ont été faits par Givelet qui construisit, avec des moyens plus que rudimentaires, un appareil fonctionnant parfaitement.” Image from: Phonographes et Musique Mécanique, Eugène-H. WEISS. Bibliothèque des Merveilles, Librairie Hachette. 1930.(édition de juin 1930), 16.

Armand Givelet was one of several post ww1 military radio operators who coincidentally discovered the musical possibilities of body capacitance to control the radio howl generated by vacuum tube radio feedback – in essence using the body as a variable capacitor to change the pitch of an audio oscillator. Alongside Maurice Martenot (The Ondes Martenot), Leon Termen (The Theremin) and others, Givelet exploited the feedback howl effect to generate a controllable sine pitch for an electronic instrument. Givelet’s instrument christened the Clavier à Lampe. This instrument was a simple a battery powered, monophonic, single oscillator device controlled by a two octave keyboard which Givelet designed to circumnavigate the poor audio fidelity of 1920s microphone technology by directly connecting the output of the instrument into a radio transmitter – the ‘direct injection’ method. The Clavier à Lampe premiered at the Trocadero Theatre, Paris in 1927  1 Hischak claims, probably in error, that Givelet took the Piano Radio Èlectrique on a promotional tour to the United States starting with a performance at the Trocadero Theatre in Philadelphia on June 9th 1927: Hischak. Thomas, S.  A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Year, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 127.. The first broadcast using Givelet’s direct injection method was made on the 27th March 1928 at the “Société des Ingénieurs Civils, Paris.

Givelet’s ultimate ambition, however, was to create a multi-tube polyphonic organ for use in radio broadcasts and liturgical music. To achieve this, Givelet began a lengthy collaboration with Eloi Coupleux of Coupleux Frerès – organ manufacturer and distributor based in Tourcing near Lille. The first fruit of this collaboration was the prototype Automatic radio-electric piano – essentially a five note polyphonic version of the Clavier à Lampe combined with a pianola style punch-paper controller (Coupleux Frerès had the monopoly for the distribution of Aeolian player-pianos in France). The coupleux-Givelet Automatic radio-electric piano was successfully demonstrated to an enthusiastic audience at the Congrès de la Radiodiffusion at the Salle Pleyel  (252 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 75008 Paris) on 16 November 1929:

The 1929 version of the ‘Automatic Radio Electric Piano’:  Eloi Coupleaux on the Left and Armand Givelet on the right. Image from: Phonographes et Musique Mécanique, Eugène-H. WEISS. Bibliothèque des Merveilles, Librairie Hachette. 1930. (édition de juin 1930), 14.

“After the remarkable speeches of M M. Mantoux and Ricard, organizers of the Congress were vigorously applauded by more than two thousand spectators, MM. Eloi Coupleux and A. Givelet, presented a musical wave (‘ondes musicales’) device of their own invention which automatically produces orchestral polyphony thanks to the unwinding of a perforated roller. […]

Eloi Coupleux and A. Givelet have succeeded in producing simultaneous notes thanks to several oscillating circuits operating at the same time with the help of a piano keyboard. From there to associating the automatic control of a piano, there was only one step: the strip (or the perforated cardboard) acts on a pan flute and controls the operation of the keys with more precision and accuracy using its electrical contacts instead of the ‘sledgehammers’ (of an organ or piano).

The extremely ingenious combinations of the device make it possible to obtain tremolo and other variable characteristics of the oscillating circuit of the corresponding note. Timbral variations are also created by the actions of filters, or superimposed oscillations. We also have at will a hard or soft, progressive attack of the note.

The re-creation of a piano or a radio organ obviously requires a large number of oscillating circuits and lamps but this number is considerably reduced by bringing in frequency doublers, for example, which make it possible to immediately obtain the notes of the upper scale.”2Lallemant, Paul, ‘En Marge De La Profession’ , Le Moniteur des architectes : organe… de la Société nationale des architectes de France, Paris, 01/04/1933, 66-70.

A third prototype from the Givelet-Coupleux collaboration was a was a fully polyphonic organ with 2 manuals and pedals known as the Orgue radio-électrique which was shown at the Académie des Sciences, Paris on October 6th, 1930. This instrument was developed into what became the final instrument from the Givelet–Coupleux team, a huge multi-oscillator polyphonic organ christened the Orgue des Ondes.

Armand Givelet Biographical notes

Armand Givelet (born: 21 07 1889 Reims France – died: 09 11 1963 La Varenne St-Hilaire, St-Maur-des-Fossés) was originally  an engineer in the French military during the First World War but  soon recognised the potential of Lee De Forest’s triode technology. He founded and became president of the Radio-Club de France (1921) and the T.S.F. (‘Transmission sans fil’ or Wireless) engineering school. Givelet became a recognised authority on radio technology and an inventor who held many patents for radio and broadcast equipment as well as his work with electromechanical (tone-wheel) and valve based electronic musical instruments; His particular contribution was a stabilised audio oscillator that used much less power than previous triode circuitry.

Givelet’s first complete instrument was the The monophonic Piano Radio-électrique unveiled in 1927. In early 1929 Givelet began a lengthy collaboration with the organ Builder Eloi Coupleux and the Coupleux-frères company  that produced some of the earliest polyphonic electronic organs – designed primarily for the church and religious music market. The largest of the Coupleux-Givelet instruments was the Orgue des Ondes built initially for Le Poste Parisien – a huge instrument which comprised of 200 oscillator tubes producing 70 different timbres or stops. Despite their unique features, The Coupleux-Givelet organs were rapidly made obsolete by much smaller and cheaper organs such as the Hammond Organ. Only four Orgue des Ondes were sold by Coupleux-frères to churches in France.

Givelet also wrote radio plays under the pseudonym Charles de Puymordant.3 Poincignon, Jean-Gabriel , La Renaissance du Radio Club de France, Le Haut-Parleur, N° 820, Juillet 1948, 359. and published a number of books on physics and music.

An article in Parole Libre (29-10-1927) describes the character and appearance of Armand Givelet:

“Mr. Armand Givelet has produced a number of inventions, including some outside the the wireless industry.  As early as 1917 he built a spark-gap transmitter without valves and the first commercial amplifier in 1918 . The silhouette of M. Givelet is amusing: very long, dry, a little bent. Author of magazines on the T.S.F., he always appears smiling. Very short-sighted, with wrinkled eyelids, he is constantly browsing. Very dark, he has a thick goatee, short mustache, high hair. He is gesticulating, active, endearing. Vice President short mustache, high hair. It is wide, overflowing, a little diffuse. At 38, he not only has a magnificent past, but the whole future of the most knowledgeable, most disinterested and most deserving scientist, despite being… French!”

Caricature of Armand Givelet: Armand Givelet Inventeur. La Parole libre : supplément du Journal parlé…. 10-29-1927, 2.

Sources

Carpentier, Olivier .’L’ Aventure industrielle des frères Coupleux, 1900-1935′ Préface de Douglas Heffer, éditions de l’ Inoui, 2004.

La Vie et les ondes : l’oeuvre de Georges Lakhovsky / Michel Adam et Armand Givelet, 1936.

Givelet, A. ‘L’Orgue Electronique Système Coupleux-Givelet de l’église de Villemomble, près Paris, Le Genie Civil: revue générale des industries françaises et étrangères, 1932-03-05. 244-246.

‘Instrument de Musique synthétique (Piano Radioélectrique), Le Genie Civil: revue générale des industries françaises et étrangères, 18/02/1928. 175.

Le Monde, 1989-07-21, 23.

References:

  • 1
    Hischak claims, probably in error, that Givelet took the Piano Radio Èlectrique on a promotional tour to the United States starting with a performance at the Trocadero Theatre in Philadelphia on June 9th 1927: Hischak. Thomas, S.  A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Year, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 127.
  • 2
    Lallemant, Paul, ‘En Marge De La Profession’ , Le Moniteur des architectes : organe… de la Société nationale des architectes de France, Paris, 01/04/1933, 66-70.
  • 3
    Poincignon, Jean-Gabriel , La Renaissance du Radio Club de France, Le Haut-Parleur, N° 820, Juillet 1948, 359.