Last Sunday, at Long Melford, I spent a happy hour admiring Martin Ivatt’s Traditional Fairground Organ and being shown round its internals by its constructor. Although it is a pretty close copy of the Victorian machine, it is newly built to an extraordinarily high standard, all glowing brass and mahogany, with gilded columns and mouldings. There are rows of pipes with three lovely marionettes carved from lime wood in front, two percussionists flanking the conductor. There are cymbals, drums and triangles. The whole machine is mounted in a trailer the size of a small caravan and is regularly seen at carnivals, Fetes, parties and weddings around East Anglia. It is a lovely noise. To stand in front of it is a joyously physical experience, as it belts out the ‘Thunderbirds’ theme, complete with drums and other percussion. It is an experience too rich to be captured on a recording. Curiously, almost every tune comes out sounding like nineteenth-century French light-opera, but then, how appropriate to the technology.
The Victorian automatic organs are much closer to the modern computer than the strange devices of Charles Babbage. They read fanfold punched tapes, and there are pneumatic relays in quantity, which work flawlessly. There is even logic to allow AND-ing and OR-ing of pneumatic signals. I was fascinated by the way the punched tapes were read in over a brass plate, punctuated with square holes linked to a vacuum cylinder via a bank of pneumatic relays. It was very much like the Pianola mechanism, but more sophisticated. Good solid technology. Nowadays, fairground organs are built with direct midi interfaces as well as the traditional punched card. This means that one can cut down on the mechanical complexity. Organs can be purchased with a PC in the back which can control the mechanism entirely. The result is fine to listen to but nothing beats the sound that comes from an organ playing a hand-punched tape. It now seems to me to be pretty obvious that we should hire Mr Ivatt and his glorious machine for Lionel’s splendid Summer Garden Party. There is something to enjoy for all ages, for the geek and for the technophobe.
A thought kept nagging me. This archaic but effective technology, perfectly capable of decoding the signals of the Russian navy of the Crimean War, or producing logarithmic tables for ordnance, was already there had Babbage not decided to go his own way. We are only beginning to be aware of the enormous contribution that Charles Babbage made in his code-breaking activities. It seems that he managed to crack the Vegenere cipher during the Crimean war and both he and the British government managed to keep the fact secret. The code was continued in use until 1863 due to the general confidence in its security. The British government’s ability to read secret communications in this period gave it great political and military advantages (See The Cogweel Brain, by Doron Swade). Could it be that other agencies used the obviously favourable pneumatic technology of the fairground organ to produce a machine that was able to crack ciphered messages. Of course, we haven’t heard about it but then we hadn’t realised what the great Charles Babbage achieved either! Maybe the best-kept secret is still a secret.