Recently on X I asked people to tell me what ideas/things they had heard jew’s claim were ‘jewish inventions’; one of those that came back to my surprise was the electric organ. Now I can find no evidence online of jews claiming to have created it but based on this respondent’s word and evident good faith; I presume at least one jew has made this claim thus I will address it here.
I should also add that I suspect this claim might well be a corruption of the not infrequent jewish ‘invention myths’ that they invented the first portable synthesizer (1) and/or the gramophone/phonograph (2) although obviously I cannot prove this.
Now the history of the electric organ is very simple in that its immediately precursor was the ‘Harmonium’ (aka the ‘Pump Organ’ or ‘Reed Organ’) which was itself based on the Chinese free-reed mouth organ called the ‘Sheng’ and the traditional European portable pump organ of the early seventeenth century called the ‘Regal’. (3)
The first Harmonium was a small portable one demonstrated by the German doctor and polymath Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein in St. Petersburg in 1780. (4) While the first Harmonium proper was created to Kratzenstein’s design by the German Catholic priest and musicologist Abbe Georg Joseph Vogler in 1790. (5)
The Harmonium in turn developed into the electric organ in in the form of the ‘Telharmonium’ of American inventor Thaddeus Cahill in 1897. (6)
The electric organ then began to be developed throughout the 1930s with the ‘Hammond Organ’ of Laurens Hammond and John Hanert being invented in 1934, Richard Ranger’s ‘Rangertone’ in 1931/1932, the ‘Robb Wave Organ’ by Morse Robb in 1936 and Edwin Welte’s ‘Lichtton Orgel’ in 1935.
Jews figure absolutely nowhere in the history of electric organs thus we can safely state that the electric organ is most certainly not a jewish invention.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-portable
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-gramophonephonograph
(3) https://www.patmissin.com/history/western.html
(4) Idem.
(5) Curt Sachs,1940, ‘The History of Musical Instruments’, 1st Edition, W. W. Norton: New York, pp. 184; 406–407
(6) https://web.archive.org/web/20010303023216/http://www.synthmuseum.com/magazine/0102jw.html