The ‘Polytone’ & ‘Electrotone’, Arnold Lesti, Fredrick Minturn, Sammis & James H. Nuthall, USA USA, 1933-1939.

F. Sammis (L) and A. Lesti (R) with the Polytone. image: Electronics, USA Feb 1934, 39.

“What will the musical world say when pipe organs are made without pipes, pianos without strings, bands without brass instruments and the woodwinds without either the wood or the wind? Well -it had better steel itself for a pleasant shock for these things have come to pass.”1Sammis, F.M. (1934) The Polytone, Radio Craft, May 1934, 657, 678.

The Polytone was designed by the Italian-born electrical engineer (and inventor of the Humbucker acoustic pickup) Arnold Lesti, the US born RCA engineer Frederick Sammis and Wurlitzer employee James Nutall. The Polytone (1933) was a development of Lesti and Sammis’ earlier Radio Organ of a Trillion Tones (1930). The instrument used the same photo-electrical sound production techniques as the Radio organ – in short; sounds were generated by passing light beams through (removable) rotating glass discs printed with optical waveforms – and was produced at RCA’s Phototone sound film studios in Hollywood, California around 1933. 

The Polytone organ circa 1934

Completed in 1934, the Polytone was designed to be a versatile domestic home organ that could photo-electrically imitate a wide variety of instruments and “many beautiful tone colours” and uniquely, was one of the first multi-timbral instruments:

“Imagine being able to sit down in your living room or den and to command an orchestra to play what you will, or to play your own piano and to have this new instrument add orchestral accompaniments and effects, or pipe organ tones or tone colors which you yourself may invent on the spur of the moment and change them this moment and the next and almost forever without tiring of this new world of tone magic. “2Sammis, F.M. (1934) The Polytone, Radio Craft, May 1934, 657, 678.

The instrument was played using three five octave keyboards and could “for a few cents” be played automatically with a punch-paper roll of the type used on player pianos. The device could be constructed in kit form ordered through the post by radio enthusiasts or purchased as a finished unit.

Lesti and Sammis demonstrating the optical waveform disks of the Polytone c1933
Sammis and Nutall marketed a simplified two manual development of the Polytone called the Electrotone  in 1939 which allowed the user to draw their own sounds via the Electrotone factory facility: “Incidentally these forms can be drawn at will; the owner can draw anything he likes, Mickey Mouse if he cares to, and the Nuttall-Sammis factory will make one photographic copy of it, and then reproduce it 88 times in two lines, to be inserted in the tone-groove under the exciter-lamp. Of course also, to carry theory to absurdity, the full violin section of the Philadelphia Orchestra could be recorded by an oscillograph record, and the resulting shape turned into a tone-strip for the Nuttall-Sammis electrotone— and we theoretically should then be able to get the full violins of that delightful Orchestra as a stop on our electrotone, and it should be precisely the same quality.” 3Sammis, F, (1939), the Nutall-Sammis Electrotone, The American Organist, February 1939, 47-51.
N.B. There was no connection between the Lesti and Sammis’ Polytone and the Polytone microtonal harmonium invented by Arthur Fickénscher and constructed at the University of Virginia. 4Davies, Hugh, (2014), The Polytone, Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, Oxford University Press, 523.

Biography: Frederick Minturn Sammis.

Born: 23-05-1877 Lexington, Greene, New York, United States – Died:1953 Santa Barbara, Ventura, California.

Frederick Minturn Sammis. Image: American Organist 02-1939, 50.

Sammis joined the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America in 1902 and eventually promoted to Chief Engineer in 1910 – which at that time was mainly focussed on radio connections between shipping and land stations. in 1915, Sammis resigned from Marconi and joined The American Radio and Research Association (AMRAD) where he specialised in making radio receivers for the U.S. Navy and the domestic US market. Following the war, Sammis moved to Hollywood in order to work for RCA Photophone as their Pacific Coast Manager. RCA Photophone Inc. was a subsidiary of RCA, set up in 1928 in order to exploit the Photophone sound-on-film system. During this period, Sammis experimented with the musical aspects of  sound film and created three musical instruments: the Radio Organ of a Trillion Tones (1930), the Polytone (1933) the Singing Keyboard (1936) and Electrone (1939). In 1940 he joined the Overseas Trading Corp, as resident agent in charge of the LA office. Sammis died in 1953 in Santa Barbara, Ventura, California.

5 The life and career of Frederick Minturn Sammis, Irelands Eye, https://irelandseye.ie/the-life-and-career-of-frederick-minturn-sammis, retrieved: 19-01-24.

References:

  • 1
    Sammis, F.M. (1934) The Polytone, Radio Craft, May 1934, 657, 678.
  • 2
    Sammis, F.M. (1934) The Polytone, Radio Craft, May 1934, 657, 678.
  • 3
    Sammis, F, (1939), the Nutall-Sammis Electrotone, The American Organist, February 1939, 47-51.
  • 4
    Davies, Hugh, (2014), The Polytone, Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, Oxford University Press, 523.
  • 5
    The life and career of Frederick Minturn Sammis, Irelands Eye, https://irelandseye.ie/the-life-and-career-of-frederick-minturn-sammis, retrieved: 19-01-24.