Stuff You Should Know - Laurens Hammond: The Non-Musical Genius Who Changed Popular Music

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Laurens Hammond invented the Hammond organ and in the process changed music history. But he was much more than that. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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by going to leak tree slash sysk or stuffyshinow.com and check out our on tour page. And we'll see you September 8th. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know. Part of our ongoing musical saga. Just frequently overlooked. But when we do them, we hit them out of the park. Remember, remember the one where we talked about pitch and we got every single thing we could have possibly gotten wrong wrong. I filed this more sort of in the same category as the great episodes

we did on Les Paul and Leo Fender. Yeah music. Yeah but you know why you got to bring up our worst music one. What else have we done some other musical stuff? Haven't we've done like actual genres, punk and hip hop and disco? Yes, great one. You love that one. We have a robust musical suite going and this adds to it. I think this is a good idea in your part because we're talking about a guy who I always thought his first name was John and I couldn't figure out why and then I realized that Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park. His name was John Hammond. That's funny. For sure. Yeah.

So his name actually isn't John. It's Lawrence, but I think you pronounce it like Lawrence, but it's spelled Lawrence. Yeah. I've heard Lawrence Hammond. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, it's very interesting. But he went by Larry, so it was just come Larry. Yeah, that's why I thought they probably

pronounced it Lawrence, but if you recognize his last name, not from Jurassic Park, but from the Electric organ because he was, indisputably, the inventor of the Electric organ. He was the first guy to really put everything together and make it work. That's right. Specifically, obviously the Hammond organ and very much notably the Hammond B3, which was one of the organs in his line of organs. And if you are a piano player or an organist,

a keyboard person, then you're like, oh yeah, speak to me, baby. If you're not and you're like, a ham and B3, what's that? It is the sound of rock and roll. It is, it is, Refugee by Tom Petty and half the songs in Boston. And it's, oh, yeah, you know, the big organ solo and the big Boston suite. It is like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan and Wider Shade of Pale by Prokall Haram. It is in so many songs that you know and love one of the more and that's not to mention you know jazz and everything else that the Hammond B-3 was used for. But it really made its mark on rock and roll

in the 60s and 70s, even though it was built and created in 1935, and even though Larry Hammond, by all accounts, was tone deaf and did not play a note of any instrument ever in his life. Yeah, but I mean, that by his own admission from what I understand. It's like Leo Fender.

Yeah. I forgot about that by his own admission from what I understand. It's like Leo Fender. Yeah. I forgot about that, but yeah. One other, I think one other group that requires shouting, I think Dr. Teeth played a Hammond B3. Absolutely. I'm pretty sure. So, yeah, Larry Hammond didn't know what he was doing with music, but he knew what he was doing with engineering, specifically electrical engineering,

which at the time he was studying this, he was born in 1895, started studying in the first couple decades of the 20th century, this was some brand new stuff, and this guy was at the bleeding edge of the whole thing, which I used correctly, finally. Did you say leading or bleeding? I said bleeding. No, bleeding is when it leads to bad things. People have been electrocuted. Okay, that's a good point. So Hammond was born, a young boy, and just not such a Chicago in the suburb of Evanston,

Illinois, like you said, in 1895, and he was the only boy of four kids. He had three sisters. He had a father who was a banker who died when he was two. And a mother named, this is a great name, idea strong Hammond, who was an impressionist painter and pretty accomplished in an artist and a creative. So once Mr. Hammond dies when little Larry is just two, she says, you know what, I'm pecking up my three girls and my son. And we're going to Europe where you can be submerged in the arts

and get what I think is probably a more proper education. Yeah, so from the time they moved there, and he was four, till the time they moved back to Evanston when he was 14, they lived in Geneva, in Dresden, and Paris. And one of the things about Larry Hammond was from an extraordinarily young age, he was a tinkerer, he wanted to know how things worked. And when they landed in Paris, I'm not sure exactly what age he was at the time, I think he was a tween possibly. But France was like, this was when the first cars were really being designed and built.

And France was the epicenter of that. And Larry, little Larry Hammond happened to live there at the time. So he was taking apart engines from a very young age and actually came up with the crude version of an automatic transmission a decade before it was ever actually patented. That's what this kid was doing as a tween. Yeah, yeah, as a 12 year old. He was incredibly brilliant, probably a genius.

I know that we're just thrown around a lot. But if you're doing that kind of thing when you're 12 in the early 20th century then that qualifies in my book. Yeah, I was putting on like half a bottle of polo cologne and wandering around the mall at this age. I was in the basement hiding from Satan. Thank you. That's another thing to do. That's another thing to do. So the Hammons were like I said, they were all pretty accomplished.

Well, the mom was pretty accomplished and all the sisters would go on to do. So the Hammons were, like I said, they were all pretty accomplished. Well the mom was pretty accomplished and all the sisters would go on to do great things. His sister, Eunice, was a writer and a poet and edited a poetry magazine. His sister, Louise, was a missionary in China who had transcribed Christian himnils and religious books in Chinese. And his sister Peggy was a musician. She was a cellist, a world-class cellist. But young Larry was not inclined musically. When they went back to Evanston, Illinois, he continued to sort of experiment and take things apart and put them back together. And

eventually he got a little taste of success early on when he was 16. He got his first US patent with kind of a new and improved barometer that he ended up making a few hundred books off of, which you know, was pretty good for a 16 year old and the 19, what is this? 20s at this point. Teens? Yeah, it would have been 19th, four, 19, oh nine. Okay, yeah. 19, 11, somewhere in there. All right. So yeah, he ended up going on to college. I don't think there was ever any question whether he was going to or not. Thanks to his mom and her strong will about education and work ethic. And he ended up at Cornell and Ithaca and apparently according to the Larry Hammond legend

He finally kind of came to understand His own maybe mission in life if not brilliance from when I read you had a bit of an ego here there Although he was generally a good guy This story kind of gypes. I've never known any genius inventors to have you large egos Right, it's unusual. Usually very meek, and they hide in the basement from Satan too. That's right. But he, the night before exams, he and his friends went out to Syracuse and were drinking, drinking, drinking, and caught the last train back to Ithaca.

And when they got to class, they were still kind of drunk. And Larry Hammond wandered into the wrong class. Did he not? What happened after that, Chuck? Well, apparently he went in on exam day to an electrical engineering class that he wasn't even taking and aced the final or aced the exam. I don't know if it was a final. And I think, like you said, as the legend goes, that's when he was like, huh, I'm a pretty smart guy and I am good at inventing things. And so that's what I'm

going to dedicate my life to. Yeah. He's not only that, he was going to be an independent inventor. That is a, that's a life choice right there. Oh, right. Like not going to work for GE or Westinghouse or whatever. Right. And he didn't, he ended up going somewhere. I don't remember where. He had a couple of jobs for sure, especially to start out. But the first thing he did after Cornell was to go and list in World War One. Yeah. And I think he was stationed in France for a little while. Was mistaken for a French deserter because his French was so good. Another part of his legend.

Yeah. It's a good little story. But then after that, he moved to Detroit and he took a job. He became chief engineer and he's still very young at a company that made boat engines. Because remember, he had spent a lot of his tweens taking engines apart. He could ace an electrical engineering final, but he also was studying mechanical engineering at the time. So it makes sense that he was working at a company that made boat engines. Yeah, and he was, it was called the Grey Motor Company, and apparently the guy he was working for was someone that served with him in army and said, I think it wasn't enough money or something, and under the table, this guy paid him an extra 300 bucks a week that no one knew about just to keep him working on these

boat engines Like that. He knew he was that valuable and that he probably shouldn't be making boat engines So he greased the wheel. He greased the palm a little bit. He greased the propeller But remember he wanted to be an independent inventor and if you have the spirit of an inventor In the ego of somebody who can ace an electrical exam without taking the test, no amount of money is going to make you satisfied spending your life making boat engines for somebody else. So he struck out and I think he did it the smart way. He struck out as in failed like baseball. No, the other way around. Yeah, like struck out on his own. Exactly. Just so people know.

I think he was still working though and like at night he was working on his own stuff. So this was while he was working at the boat company from what I understand. But he came up with something called the tickless clock, not ticklish clock, a tickless clock that you couldn't hear tick because apparently that drove him crazy. And I feel this guy, if you've ever had a loud clock, a tickless clock, that you couldn't hear tick because apparently that drove him crazy. And I feel this guy, if you've ever had a loud clock in the room with you while you're trying to sleep, there's nothing else you can concentrate on except the stupid ticking of that stupid clock. And Larry Hammond felt the same way, so he invented one that didn't make the ticking sound.

That's right. And he was like, you know what? I'm going to sell this idea. He sold that idea, made some pretty good money on it, enough that he was able to move to New York and open up his own sort of invention factory. And he admitted something there that kind of was the beginning of what would end up like informing his future career in a lot of ways. And that was the synchronous motor.

In America at the time, we were making, this is the early 20s, they were making the switch to 60 hertz from 50 hertz. Westinghouse came along and they had a lot of sway obviously and said, you know what, this arc lighting system we have looks a lot better at 60 Hertz. We need everything to be the same. So United States, can we all move to 60 Hertz in the government? And said, sure. Right.

Yeah. Sorry. So 60 Hertz is 60 cycles a second. And it's part of alternating current, which is we remember one out the current wars because you can send it over very long distances with very little loss of energy, right? Yeah. So they switched over to 60 cycles a second and Hammond said, well, wait a minute, that's precise. Like we're talking about a precise, like something is moving back and forth between the poles 60 times a second and we're talking about electrons you can set your watch by electrons basically

so his synchronous motor plugged into that 60 cycle a second electrical current and it created a motion that spawn just as reliably as those electrons which pulls back and forth 60 times a second. That's right. And if you're thinking, I don't even know what this means, guys, who cares? What this means is all of a sudden, you can electrify things that were previously not electrified.

Yeah. Like, oh, I don't know, that tickless clock that you still had to wind over and over, like every clock in the world that you had to wind over and over. By the way, Chuck, that tickless clock, the way it was tickless is the motor was put into a soundproof box. Yeah, pretty easy. Which means that you could also say

it was a tick in the box. Okay, so the synchronous motor though, this was the fact that it was very precise, that it was going to spin X number of times every second. That was a really big deal because if you have something that is that precise and that has is current is getting an electrical current that's keeping it that precise no matter what. You can do all sorts of things. Like you said, he had an electrical clock. You can make little shutter spin in front of people's eyes without them even realizing that they're spinning. All sorts of things you can do with a synchronous motor. And that was the basis of a lot of his inventions that followed. All right, I think that was a great little tease setup.

I'm sorry for teasing you everybody. No, I love it because people are going like, what do you mean shutters in front of your eyes? Well, we're gonna explain that right after this. We'll be right back. All right, so Josh left a great little tease. Sorry. I did mention that he started making these clocks, but this next thing actually happened first because he did have a lot of success

with the Hammond Clock Company because everyone was like these electric clocks are amazing. I don't want to wind my clock ever again Right, and you don't have to but before he found success there He invented basically invented three D movies in the silent era of cinema Insane. So remember from our stereo gram or magic eye episode? Yeah, this is perfect for this. It is.

It's basically the same stuff going on around the same time, but he came up to something called the Tel Aviv. And you basically created a film with two cameras, set a little bit apart. And all of a sudden you've got two slightly different perspectives of the same thing, which as you remember from our, our stereogram was episode, the eye loves to turn into depth and perspective. Right. So then you project the movie onto the screen using those two projectors, not overlapping, but alternating very quickly between the right image and the left image, right image, left

image. That sounds like a headache and it probably would be if it weren't for the viewers that that Hammond created that every seat had that you looked at this movie through. And when the left image was up on the screen, a shutter closed over your right eye. So all you could see was your left image and then the same thing for your right eye with the right image. And this all happened so fast that your brain didn't make note of it. All it saw were two slightly different perspectives

of the same thing and turned it into, what's called parallax depth, based on your position of where you're sitting and where you're viewing an object. Amazing. And again, this is all possible because of that synchronous motor, which was spinning these two little things in front of your eyeballs. Exactly. And that nuts, this was the 20s. And this guy came up with 3D. And it worked really well. It worked so well that people were a little put off by it. Yeah. I read an article from the Atlantic that was written in 1940,

a profile of John Hammond. They said that the movie, the one movie that he made, Hello Mars, was so crystal clear that it says close-ups of love scenes were almost embarrassing. And you could see the sweat on the actor's faces. So apparently it was distracting. It was so realistic and so lifelike that nobody was following the plot and they were maybe even a little put off. All right, so this isn't working out as far as being a great business idea, but he was like, you know what, I still, you know, I could make this thing without those little spinning goggles. He said, I could actually do it with colored lenses. These little cheap cardboard

things that, you know, in 30 years, everyone is going to think is the coolest thing ever. Yeah. And he did that. He created some for Ziegfield himself and the Ziegfield Follies, which was the biggest show going in Vaudeville in New York. He called this the shadow graph and he had actors standing behind a transparent screen and he backlit them with with red and a green light,

spaced a few feet apart, and then projected their shadows on the screen, and when you wore those 3D glasses, it, again, created depth and it looked like they were sort of leaping off the screen. And Zigfield loved this one. He was like, I'll pay you $75,000 to use this stuff for two years, which is about 1.3 million bucks today.

Do you know how many Drakmas it is? How many? 420,578,000 plus Drakmas. Yeah, so by this point, he's rich or at the very least, he can use that money to fund doing whatever he wants to do invention-wise. Being an independent inventor, he's realized his dream by this point. That's right. In the 20s, so he was in his 20s still.

It's pretty great stuff. Also, I saw that this is the only effect that Ziggfield used over two seasons. Ziggfield liked to keep things fresh and cutting edge, but he loved this shadow graph so much that he used it over two different seasons, which is kind of an honor and an of itself. Super cool. So let's get back to that synchronous motor, the 60-cycle second that was so reliable, you could never have to wind a clock from it, right? All right.

Well, let's go back even further than that, Chuck. Let's go back to the 1890s, which is the same year Hamam was born, 1895. And there was an American inventor named Thaddeus K. Hill who was the first person to come up with an electro-mechanical, not strictly electronic, but it had some gears and stuff to it. So it was electro-mechanical. It's called the telharmonium.

And well, let's go back even further than that, Chuck. Okay. To the 1860s, and we're gonna hop on over to Germany. All right. I'm picking up what you're laying down. There was a German scientist named Hermann von Helmholtz. And he, he knew music a little bit,

and he's like, here's one thing I know, is that when you hear a musical note, it's a sound wave that you're hearing, vibrating at a frequency. Like if you hear an A key on a piano, it's vibrating at a very specific frequency that makes the sound of what you would call an A note. But here's the deal. He said, it sounds more than an A note. It's very warm and there's depth to it. And he figured out what your hearing is called a harmonic,

which is when one thing vibrates, things near it are also activated and maybe vibrate a little bit. And these little background frequencies vibrating along with that A note create this richer, fuller sound called a harmonic. Yeah, so Hemholz's big contribution in the 1860s is to chart all of these harmonics. Yeah. So, from what I understand, then he would go through and say an A on a cello has all these accompanying vibrations.

And A on a violin has all these different vibrations and wrote them out as frequencies, right? So he created a scientific, mathematic road map to recreating those frequencies using something other than a cello or other than a violin. If you have that information and you can reproduce those frequencies together, they will make an artificial sound of a violin or an artificial sound of a cello. This is what Hemholz contributed, which is pretty significant. Now back to K-Hill. All right. So back to K-Hill, again, he was the American inventor who invented the first electro-mechanical. I don't even think he said musical instrument.

Did I just stop with electro-mechanical? Yeah. Man, what a sloppy. That was called Nagarna. You're great. That was called the telharmonium and he created something called the tone wheel. And it was, you really should look it up. It's kind of hard to describe. It's this very large disc-shaped motor.

It has cogs. And when you spin that rotor, working with a magnet, like, you know, the same way you would with an electric guitar pickup, the cogs passed when you spin that rotor, working with a magnet like, you know, the same way you would with an electric guitar pickup, the cogs pass through a magnetic field by this coiled copper wire around the magnet. And if you spin it at a steady pace, it's going to generate a very specific frequency, an electrical frequency. And if you amplify that, that's where you're going to finally hear that musical tone come out that the hemholes was talking about so many years earlier. Yeah, so what if you have say 400 cogs on this tone wheel and they pass through the electrical field 400 times a second, it makes one full revolution per second.

It will generate a current with a frequency of 400 hertz. And that is the same frequency as an A4 note. So what K-hels has just done is create a way to reproduce that A4 note or any note you want to, if you can figure out what the frequency is, thanks to hemholtz, and then build a cog that has that number of little prongs or something on it, thanks to K-Hill.

Right. So, what he did, like we mentioned, was create that teleharmonium, which was sort of, like you said, the very first electro-mechanical instrument, but it was a problem because it was huge. It weighed 200 tons. It cost what would be $7 million today, and it was a size of a train car. Two point, two billion drachmas. So obviously this thing's not going to sell. Nobody's interested in a telharmonium, but that really set the stage for Larry Hammond's work.

Definitely. So that's a really important point for inventors to whenever you talk about an inventor, very, very rare that somebody comes up with a full idea from scratch. They stand on the shoulder of giants, they always say. That's what Hammond did. He was the first person to figure out how to make this stuff

practical and he had the wit and the brains and the interest to make it happen. And so after K-Hill basically gave up because he created a $7 million or 200 ton train car of a electro-mechanical instrument. Hammond was like, I'm going to pick this up. I never saw Chuck if he knew about K-Hills invention or how he knew about K-Hills and mentioner if he was inspired by K-Hill, I'm not sure. I think that it was too... I don't know, but he basically took the tone wheel, however he heard about it, and he figured out how to make it much smaller, much more practical, rather than the size of like a huge cylinder.

It was a size about a silver dollar, And when you get something that is that useful down to that size, you can put a bunch of them together and do some really amazing stuff. And that's what he did. That was the basis of the Hammond organ. That's right. It didn't initially start out that way though. He had been, like I said, selling a lot of electric clocks

was making pretty good money doing that. But then everybody started making electric clocks, and his company wasn't as valuable all of a sudden. And I don't think we mentioned that he was an independent inventor, but he wanted to put people to work. He was very proud of supplying jobs to people. And he always wanted to have his his successful company, you know, certainly to enrich himself, but also so he could, so he could put people to work. I mean, this

was a lot of this stuff was during the depression and a lot of his work was, so he was really proud of putting Americans to work. And I think Hammond eventually ended up having like 3,000 employees when the organ was at its peak, which was a really big deal to him. But the clock is slowing down, not literally. The business was, though, and he was a little nervous about what to do to keep the doors open. So, he initially thought of this tiny tone wheel thing to just make like a sound, and like, hey, it can be a gimmick, a little gadget, and you can have this little tone wheel

and plug it in, and it makes a sound, and kids will love it, almost like a toy. But he had a assistant treasure at Hammond that was a church organist. And the organist was like, man, you should make an organ. Like if you can make one sound, you can make a lot of them. And apparently Hammond loved the sound of a pipe organ. And that was it. He had the other thing, which was kind of funny, that he was making a lot of money on that also went away,

was this auto-dealing bridge table. It was a bridge table that under the table had a little mechanical system that shuffled in dealt cards literally under the table to each player. And he sold 14,000 of those in two years, but then everyone got tired of that. So he was always looking for the next thing to keep the doors open, and this, like, let's replicate a pipe organ was the next big thing. Yeah, one other thing about him is a boss too, and a company owner.

He was smart enough to surround himself with other very smart engineers. And in particular, as a guy named John Hanert, who basically co-created the Hammond organ with Hammond, I almost have the impression that of the two Hammond was the idea guy and Hanert was the one who figured out how to do it. But when you put them together, what they did was they took these tone wheels and at the behest of the organ playing treasure at the Hammond Company, realized that if you took 91 of them,

you could essentially reproduce all the sounds that a pipe organ could make, which is really something because a pipe organ can make quite a bit of very rich sounds, a lot of different sounds. That's kind of the point of a pipe organ. I didn't realize until researching this is that it's meant to not only just sound like an organ, but it's also meant to mimic other instruments.

It does that by mimicking the timber of a different thing. A timber is like you were talking about where if you play an A on a piano, it sounds different than an A on a cello, well the difference is timber. And if you can again figure out the harmonics surrounding that note, you can recreate what it sounds like on a piano and A or an A on a cello. And that pipe organs were able to do this. They did it using compressed air, mechanical stuff. John Hammond was the one who was like, I can take one of these giant things and size it down and make this whole, the same thing happen with electronics. Yeah, it's like, you know, today if you go by a Cassio keyboard, it's going to say, you know,

horns, strings, flute, trumpet, guitar. And those things never sound, strings do a pretty good job. But, you know, when you hit the, if you play a series of horns, you're not gonna say, like, oh my gosh, this is a Maryachee band in here. Right. It approximates the sound in a fun and useful way. Even the Samba beat's not gonna dress that up enough to pass muster.

But you're right, at the very least this was like a big deal. Piperkins could do it to get different sounds that would, you know, like, this is a flute or an organ version of a flute essentially. Yeah, they're called, those were the stops. Like you would pull a stop to let a rank or timber of pipes play. You could close the stop to keep that one from playing and allow other ones to play. One of the Hammond's big breakthroughs was to figure out how to do that, again, electronically.

Yeah, like if you've ever seen a pipe organ up close, they have these little round knobs, and that's called a stop knob, and it's either on or off, and you pull it in or pull it out and that's letting compressed or Pressurized air in or out to change the sound. I saw that that's where the term the phrase pulling out all the stops comes from when you have all the stops open all the Tight are playing at the same time, which is yeah Pretty cool. Yeah, so Hammond figures all this out. He gets a piano guts it Installs platinum switches installss 8.5 miles of wiring, installs hundreds of transistors, and they are spinning these tiny tone wheel motors when you press a key.

And it's pretty ingenious. So all of a sudden he's electrified this thing, even though he doesn't play musical instrument. And instead of using these mechanical stops, he has these switches called tone bars. So if you ever see a Hammond organ and you see above the keys there, kind of where the stop knobs aren't in organ, there are these little bars that you can just pull in or out. And it has the same effect basically and you know depending on Who you are you might have your favorite tone bar settings for different songs? I think the classic Like Jimmy Smith was this guy that was sort of really popularized at jazz organ and

Everyone knows like this is the Jimmy Smith setting like if you go to YouTube and you're talking about different tone setting, they'd be like, oh yeah, Jimmy Smith pulled all three of these on the left out and that was his setting. And you can replicate this stuff, it's pretty cool. Yeah, so one of the things that Hammond was interested in doing too was rather than say, you know, make this combination and it's the strings or make this combination as the flute. Yeah. He left it up to the person. So like those stops would have to do with attack and decay, like how fast the sound started and how long it took to finally go silent again.

These were like what the sound bars were doing. It wasn't like, oh, I'll press this button and now it's a string. And the reason why I did that, he likened it in an interview I saw to how like a true painter would never buy a flesh pink paint. They would buy a red paint and a white paint. And orange paint and green paint, but they would make their own paints. He was saying like his ham and organ allows an organist to create their own sounds by putting together this basic stuff

and creating something incredibly rich. In fact, I think they calculated that there were 253 million possible tonal variations that you could come up with with the ham and organ. Amazing. That's from 38 draw bars. Really, really cool. Yeah, for sure. Should we take a break or no? I was going to say we should probably take a break. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's do it. So Hammond's organs took off really quickly. I think he sold 1,400 or something like that the first year. Imagine that, Chuck. Yeah, it's a lot. So, and I think they were originally about $30,000 today. I don't know how many Drockmas, but they were $1,250 in the 30s, the mid 30s. And it's a lot of money, like you had to be wealthy

and you had to be really into music, or you had to have a church that was kind of wealthy to afford it, but that's who we marketed to, serious musicians, home musicians, professional musicians, but also churches more than anything. And it worked, like you sold he sold 1400 in the first year. Yeah, George Gershwin supposedly the first person to buy one even though Henry Ford said he wanted the first six. But as the story goes, George Gershwin got the first. He's selling to a,

like you said, a lot of churches, I think, what was the number like number like by 1965 more than 50,000 churches had Hammond organs. By 1938 there were a thousand churches, but also baseball stadiums, if you ever been to a baseball stadium, they play those Hammond organs, radio soap operas very early on, you know, started, you know, if you remember like like the dramatic music of us up on the radio, that was an organ, a Hammond organ. So 1936, this is just one year into the Hammond organ. Things are really, really doing well. And the pipe organ industry starts complaining to the FTC. And they're like, this guy is out there making all these claims about how you can replicate

every sound on a pipe organ, how it can, it sounds the same as a $10,000 pipe organ. And like, these are false claims and you can't say that stuff. So the FTC started snooping around and they said, you know what, you can't make these claims, you can't say that stuff in your ads. And we're gonna give you a cease and desist letter that says like what you can and can't say. And Hammond says, oh, you know what we should do?

We should have a blind listening test of it's like a John Henry thing. Like my little, I think it was a $2,600 organ that he used and a $75,000 pipe organ. And let's go head to head and have experts listen in and say what they think. Yeah, so that's what they staged, I think, in 1936. Yeah, well, I think that happened in 1937,

but he'd been fighting with the FTC for a while at that point. Okay, so yeah, that was exactly the kind of guy he was. He was exactly the kind of person to come up with a blind listening test to settle things with the FTC. You know, that's not how the FTC did things, but John Hammond kind of made them do it that way. And it was really, really risky because he would have been essentially guilty of unfair business practices, and that could have all sorts of terrible effects. But from what I saw that they weren't going to let him use the name or the word organ for his instrument anymore. I'm guessing that that would have had a pretty big damper on business as well. So he had a lot riding on this

blind test and it was very mavericky to suggest it in the first place. But in 1937 at the University of Chicago Chapel, they went head to head. They hid speakers, Hammond speakers among the pipes and put both the organ, the Hammond organ and the pipe organ behind screens. And they had 30 different little pieces of music. And each one played 15. And that panel of judges that you mentioned, they marked down which of those 30, they thought had played it. The pipe organ or the Hammond organ? Yeah, and these were professional musicians judging. I think there were nine of them. Most of them were organists, of course, and then he also had 15 college students, and he ended up basically winning. I think they, I saw different numbers

of how much they were correctly identifying. I saw they were wrong, a third of the time. I saw they were wrong half of the time. At the end of the day, what happened was the FTC said, and this is 1938 by this point. So this thing's dragging out. They said, all right, here's a new cease and disassorder. You can't say it can reproduce a $10,000 organ because they could tell the difference there, but you know, they did find that produced like other words that we're using was that it sounded real, that it was produced fine music, that had produced beautiful music. And he was able to use this wordage and all his ads moving forward, which he took as a big victory.

Yeah, oh, for sure. And I believe it was out of that battle where they calculated the 253 million different tonal sounds. Oh, interesting. And I believe they started using that for marketing too, because if, yes, me, if I'm just an ordinary Joe, I believe they started using that for marketing too, because if, yes, me, if I'm just an ordinary Joe,

253 million different tones and makes the as good a sound as a pipe organ, I'm gonna be more wowed by the 253 million tones, even though the pipe organ makes 300 million different tones, because the pipe organ people are now there marketing to me like that in John Hammond is. So if you're a jokey-bordist you see, you see the value in this thing. For sure.

I agree. Everyone talked about Joe the Plumber. No one ever talked about Joe the Keeper. Oh man, I forgot about Joe the Plumber. Good Lord. Who is that? Who is that? That's Aaron Paylon.

I don't remember. I don't remember. But man, if you're going gonna make a movie about the 2000 odds Right having him like somewhere in the background would really be a nice touch. Yeah, and so I bomb What was that? So I bomb was the guy who rushed the stage in the I think it was a Grammy's drink Bob Dylan's acceptance speech Oh really, I don't remember that at all. Then he had a shirt on this and so I bomb no, I don't remember that Yeah, I can't remember the year and I'm sure had a shirt on this. It's soy bomb. No, I don't remember that. Yeah, I can't remember the year and I'm sure I got something wrong, but soy bomb I know is right. It wasn't Bob Dylan It was Bob Newhart. That's right. Even he won his Grammy.

All right, so he's back-selling these organs again. Famous people are using them. Baseball team, stadiums are using them. Soap offers and churches, everyone's getting on board. A woman comes along by the name of Ethel Smith, who probably did more to popularize the Hammond early on than anybody else. She was in a movie, Red Skeleton movie called Bathing Beauty, and played this song, and it's on YouTube. You should check it out, because she's just,

the lady's got crazy fingers, she's so fast. And it was like a Brazilian kind of song called Tico Tico that became a smash international musical sensation. Yes, and Ethel Smith was, she kind of idolized John Hammond because she realized what he had done by creating this Hammond organ. And so it was kind of symbiotic even though she didn't meet him until much later. But she always kind of idolized him and was very grateful to him. Because, you know, without her, or without him, she said she would have probably gotten into an older profession, the music,

what she meant. And then without her, his organ just wouldn't have been as well known, I think. Yeah, absolutely. That song was huge. Also, Jimmy Smith, the aforementioned, no relation to Ethel, jazz musician, even though people before him used it, he really kind of took it to a new level. And then we have to talk about, because I know there are keyboard players

and Hammond enthusiasts, they're like, guys, you can't talk about the Hammond organ without talking about the Leslie speaker. Yeah. If you've ever been to a show, a concert, and you've seen a Hammond organ, I almost guarantee you that sitting beside that organ is this giant brown wooden box that doesn't even look like a speaker because it doesn't have a big, browned, graded panel like most speakers do. And you might be thinking what in the world is that thing even? That is called a Leslie speaker and it is the key I think to and many people agree to what makes the Hammond organ sound so amazing.

Yeah and Don Leslie was like, hey I came up with this speaker that works really well with your organ and makes it sound a lot better. Can I come work for you or do you want to buy my idea? And remember I said at the outset that Hammond was kind of egotistical here and he was also I think you said tone deaf. And apparently when you put those two things together, he wasn't at all impressed with Leslie's invention because he couldn't hear any difference. And he also I think didn't really like somebody telling him that they had come up with something that improved on his invention totally so um for

decades there was a almost a one-sided cold war between the Hammond company or specifically um i think i called him john Hammond Larry Hammond and don Leslie and Leslie's company. He's bad, no expense. He would not entertain the idea of using these Leslie speakers in his organs. He wouldn't let anybody else do it, but they worked so well, Chuck, that if you were a Hammond dealer, an authorized Hammond dealer, you would secretly like if somebody came in and bought a B3 from you, be like, let me show you something

in the back. And you take them back there, you'd be like, you really have to have this because it makes it so much better. Yeah, he would even change the switches out from year to year. So you couldn't use it like you had to modify it basically to use it with a, a, a, a, a, Leslie. Uh, so the Leslie is really interesting. so you couldn't use it like you had to modify it basically to use it with a Leslie. So the Leslie is really interesting. It's probably we should do a short stuff on it,

but the secret to the Leslie is it's also electro-mechanical because it takes your sound and instead of just pumping it out like a regular speaker, it shoots the sound in two directions. It shoots it down to a bass speaker that is literally rotating and shoots it up to these two cones. They look like sort of like the old ear cones that you would put to your ear to hear somebody better if you were hard of hearing. Right. That were on what looks like kind of like

a record turn table. And these things spin and it would shoot the sound toward that and the sound would spin through the spinning cones and come out the other side through the speaker. It's not like it didn't have any venting for sound. It had these little slits at the top, but not like a big, huge round hole. And it was a belt driven thing by a motor and these things would spin and it was variable speed. driven thing by a motor and these things would spin and it was variable speed so if you had it really really slow it was sort of a warble if you spun it really really fast it's that sound of classic rock that you know and love or just rock and roll if you if you hear a key pressed

with that Leslie speaker spinning at top speed it's that vibrato that and it makes a, organ sound flat by comparison when you're not using one. And really just brings it alive in a small space. So, you know, a pipe organ, one of the reasons a pipe organ sounds great is because it's used in a cathedral. If you're in your basement and you can't, you replicate a really great sound, this Leslie really aids in that. The other thing is that you can't really do that. You can't really do that. You can't really do that. You can't really do that. because it's used in a cathedral. If you're in your basement and you replicate a really great sound, this Leslie really aids in that.

The other thing it does is it serves as an alternate portal to Narnia. Once it gets spinning really fast, the tears open the fabric of time and space. Yeah, so hats off to Don Leslie, you know, just a genius invention to go hand in hand. And I wish Larry Hammond had embraced it, but he did not. Yeah, the ego got in the way, I think. Even after he retired, he tried to prevent the company from doing business with Leslie. Yeah, they're like, no. Yeah, basically right when he died, they started adding Leslie speakers to their setups. It's pretty cool.

So Larry Hammond, I think I said John again, if I did, I'm sorry everybody, I'm just going to move forward. But he was a good Easter. He was more than just the Hammond organ inventor and the tickless clock, the tick and the box clock inventor or the automatic bridge table inventor. He did all sorts of other stuff too. Yeah, he invented probably the first synthesizer. It's called the Novakor. You should watch YouTube's of this thing. If you're into musical instruments like old-timey ones, this was in 1939. Robert Mogue was a five-year-old who gets credit as being the synthesizer inventor. So he invented the Novakord.

He invented all kinds of great stuff. I think he died after his death. He ended up with 110 patents to his name. CBS bought... He died in 1973. CBS had bought Hammond in 1965. They had also bought the Fender guitar company. So that's when CBS thought it was in the music instrument business for a little while.

Hammond bought it back in 1980 from CBS. In 85 they went out of business. So like the last true Hammond B3 I think rolled off the line in those years and they're I think rolled off the line in those years. And I think they made a couple of million organs. So it's not like, if you want a Hammond B3 organ, you can find them today. They aren't cheap, but it's not like some huge rare collector item or anything like that.

One other thing I thought was noteworthy Chuck is a while back you talked about how he was like, you know, a good boss and he was very proud of employing people. Two different presidents of the Hammond Company started out at the bottom. One is an office boy and one in the mail room and worked their way up. That's, I mean, just having one president, having done that is pretty impressive, but two is really significant and really I think it says a lot about the kind of company he built. Totally. Suzuki, by the way, as a post script, bought Hammond in 1989.

All right. Suzuki of the motorcycle keyboard chain. Sure. And in 2002, they started making a new version of the B3 again. I think it's called the XK3 and I listen to a comparison. I'm sure keyboard players and purists will say like, no man, you gotta have the original Hammond, but it sounded just like it to me. It was a little brighter maybe. They need to set up a blind listening test. We should have at the Rockefeller Cathedral in Chicago.

But anyway, that XK3, it sounded pretty good to me. Cool. For my dumb semi-musical year. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I enjoy these. I don't think we've done one on Moge yet, have we? I don't think so.

You keep saying Moge. It's very clearly Moge. It's Moge. I don't know. But you keep saying moug, it's very clearly moug. It's moug. I don't know. But we should do him one day. I love covering these sort of pioneers in musical invention. Yeah, it's a good little suite we're building. Okay?

Agreed, a sweet suite. So Chuck said sweet suite everybody in as long-time listeners know that just unlocked listener mail. I'm going to call this quick correction. Hey guys, love the show. Thanks for tackling the hard stuff. Quick correction from the Xenobiotics episode. Josh says during the explanation of PFAS that they get into the municipal waste water,

and we have no idea how to get them out of our water. But that isn't true. A granular activated carbon and reverse osmosis are two ways to remove PFAS from water. Lots of drinking water treatment systems are currently using this technology as we speak to remove PFAS. Not saying they're on expensive and difficult to manage, but they do exist. Keep up the great work. Whitney B. Thanks a lot Whitney B with that bit of good news. I'm glad we can get PFAS out of our water. Yes. If you want to be like Whitney Bee and say listen to me, you can send it

in an email to stuffpodcast.it.heartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart radio visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I see over the years I've compiled thousands of inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. And now I'm passing that knowledge onto you and my new daily podcast. I see daily game. In less than five minutes, I'll break down why these words matter and reveal personal stories that show them in action in my life. Listen to I see daily game every week day on iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and start your morning with me.

Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on revisionist history, I am diving into one of the weirdest and most infuriating corners in American life. Guns. All the crazy myths we have about them, everything we get wrong. We're going to talk about TV Westerns about a crime and a little town in rural Alabama. About the nuttiness of the Supreme Court, it's our biggest series ever, and the one you won't want to miss.

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