Understanding the Tone Wheel Generator

The guts of it are this tone wheel generator that has 96 tone wheels on a rod. They spin in an electric current, and each time the little cog cuts through the current, a tone is produced.

Key Features

• Each key has nine contacts which correspond to nine drawbars.
• As you press the key down, you gradually get from high to low as the contacts engage one by one.

Complexity and Design

• In each key, there are nine contacts going up and down vertically.
• It's a very complicated system, and I don't know how he came up with it.
• It's amazing that they still work all this time later, considering the design is about 70 to 80 years old.

Differences from Traditional Organs

• It's different from a church organ in that it is electric to begin with.
• These drawbars are modeled on lengths of pipe from a church organ. The original idea was to recreate a church organ.

Drawbar Specifications

If you see on slightly later models from the late 60s onward through the 70s, the drawbars had the lengths of pipe written on:

• 16
• 5 and a third
• 8
• 4
• 2 and 1
• Sub fundamentals, fundamentals, and fifths are structured as follows:
  • The white ones are all fundamentals.
  • The colored ones are sub fundamentals and fifths.

This model was made from 1955 to 1975. It is truly an incredible bit of engineering!