Robert Hope-Jones: The evolution of his organ actions in Britain from 1889 to 1903

by Colin Pykett

Revised: 9 August 2022

Abstract.  This article shows that Hope-Jones’s organ of 1889 at St John’s, Birkenhead was the first in the world whose action was designed from the outset as an integrated system by a gifted professional engineer, using electricity to control not only the key action but the speaking stops, couplers, pistons and swell shutters as well.  One of the key elements facilitating the integration was Hope-Jones’s action magnet, whose design was subtle and which is discussed at length in the article. 

The article also traces the evolution of Hope-Jones’s subsequent thinking and practice until he left for America in 1903.  His key actions remained fairly static, consisting of pneumatic amplifiers controlled by his action magnet.  However his speaking stop actions evolved progressively from organs in which all stops were on slider chests to those in which some ranks were conceived on the unit principle.  The progression was nevertheless fairly slow considering that Hope-Jones had completed his paper design for the fully unified organ by 1890 at the latest, and the article suggests that this was due to a mixture of technical and commercial considerations.  There is little doubt that the power supply limitations of the day prevented him building the power-hungry unified organ with its hundreds or thousands of individual pipe actions, and he was probably not in a position to have manufactured them economically in any case.

Hope-Jones introduced several techniques for coupling, of which his electropneumatic ladder relay was undoubtedly the prototype for that used in the Wurlitzer theatre organ many years later.  The article discusses the design features of this in detail.  However he must also have used electromagnetic (direct electric) relays in his mobile consoles because wind would not have been available.  Likewise he must also have used both electropneumatic and electromagnetic stop combination actions which are also discussed. 

Although the organ at St John’s used a dynamo to supply the action current, Hope-Jones devoted much subsequent effort to minimising the power consumption of his organs and some of his techniques are described in the article.  This was forced on him because of the need to establish a customer base in the majority of the country which did not enjoy access to mains electricity, town gas or high pressure water for blowing the instruments and thus for driving a dynamo also.  In these cases he had to use accumulators and some of his later organs would also have run for limited periods on a battery of dry cells, though definitely not on a single cell as he loudly and frequently claimed.  In all of this he was at a disadvantage because of the low resistance of his action magnet and thus its high power consumption relative to those of his competitors.  It is unfortunate that he degraded himself by the shrillness and mendacity with which he insisted the opposite was the case.

With the exception of unit chests and their means of control which he introduced only a few years later, the 1889 organ at Birkenhead contained all of the action, switching and circuit techniques which were immediately taken up and applied in electric actions worldwide.  They were not displaced until electronics began to appear in organ building in the 1960’s, and even today they remain in wide use.  This remains the measure of Hope-Jones’s legacy and achievements.

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 Version 2.8 dated 9 August 2022

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