For some unknown reason people keep trying to insist the Hammond organ is a sexy beast. Is it really?
Let's find out...
First made in 1935 the Hammond organ was a curio. It could mimic the sound of a pipe organ through some ingenious technical wizardry.
Its creator Laurens Hammond was a mechanical engineer who had started his own clock company. But he became fascinated by the noises of the moving gears in his electric clocks...
...and after much experimentation Hammond found that he could generate tones by placing a mechanically rotating wheel next to an electromagnetic pick-up.
Hammond used nine mechanical wheels to each key on a keyboard, and then added a series of drawbar controllers that could fade in or out any of the frequencies. Thus the Hammond organ was born!
The mix of drawbars and tonewheels allowed millions of potential combinations of sound. It was a versatile instrument.
Initially the Hammond organ was sold at discount to churches who could not afford a traditional pipe organ. Two types were manufactured: Spinet organs with two 44-note manuals and one octave of pedals, and Console organs with two 61-note manuals and two octaves of pedals.
These early Hammond organs needed to be linked to an amplifier, but by the 1950s versions were released with an internal power amplifier and speakers.
Hammond organs became a mainstay of the prog rock movement, but it was jazz musicians who first latched on to the instrument's versatility and potential.
In the 1970s Hammond began replacing the tonewheels with transistors. That probably did for the company as the classic Hammond sound relied on analogue electronics.
In 1985 Hammond went out of business and in 1989 the name was purchased by Suzuki. In 2002, Hammond-Suzuki launched the New B-3, a recreation of the original electromechanical instrument using contemporary electronics and a digital tonewheel simulator.
Over two million Hammond organs were manufactured by the company and it's fair to say it was one of the most influential instruments of the electronic era. Was it sexy? Perhaps a bit. But it was certainly everywhere in the 1970s!
Mr Hammond - Twitter salutes your organ!
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“Space is big. Really big,” as Douglas Adams observed. So why haven’t we seen any alien life yet?
Odds are a big universe must have some – or are the odds wrong? This is the Fermi Paradox, and today in pulp I’m looking at some of the novels that have explored it.
Don’t panic…
In 1950 Physicists Enrico Fermi and Michael Hart were chatting in the Los Alamos canteen when the topic turned to UFOs. Where were they? After a few calculations Fermi felt the probability of alien life was high enough; we just didn’t have any evidence ‘they’ were out there.
Frank Drake built on this in 1961. The Drake equation looked at the probabilities for how many stars and planets over what period could host life that could become intelligent and travel in space. Life on Earth meant the probability must be more than zero, but how much more?
Today in pulp... let me introduce you to Mark Hardin: The Penetrator!
Mark Hardin is a one-man strike force against corruption. Orphaned at the age of four he was brought up mean and hungry. He learned his fighting skills in Vietnam before returning to an America gone bad.
Actually The Penetrator is one of a long list of vigilante pulp heroes thrown up in the 1970s counter-counterculture backlash, along with The Destroyer, The Executioner The Iceman and The Marksman to name but a few.
Today in pulp I look back at an amazing but slightly forgotten British publisher: a company that made a virtue of necessity and an art form out of amazement...
Badger Books!
John Spencer and Co was founded in London in 1946 by Samuel Assael and specialised in publishing original fiction, normally written to order by freelance writers using house aliases. Like many pulp publishers they paid a flat rate for copy – up to ten shillings per 1,000 words.
Initially Spencer focussed on story magazines in digest and pocketbook form: Tales of Tomorrow, Out Of This World and Supernatural Stories focussed on fantasy and sci-fi short stories. But the digest market was beginning to decline as the post-war paperback market began to boom.
The Wimpy chain originally began in 1934 in Chicago. The name was inspired by the character of J. Wellington Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons created by E. C. Segar.
And in 1954 the company sold a license to J. Lyons & Co - owners of the Lyons Corner House - to use the Wimpy name in the United Kingdom.