Robert Hope-Jones

British-American organ maker

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Born:: Feb. 9, 1859, Hooton Grange, Cheshire, Eng.

Died:: Sept. 13, 1914, Rochester, N.Y., U.S. (aged 55)

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Robert Hope-Jones (born Feb. 9, 1859, Hooton Grange, Cheshire, Eng.—died Sept. 13, 1914, Rochester, N.Y., U.S.) was a British-American organ builder who introduced several innovations into electric-organ construction and influenced organ development in the United States.

A church organist as well as head electrician of the National Telephone Co., Hope-Jones established an organ-manufacturing business in 1889. He immigrated to the United States in 1903, and four years later, after working with the E.M. Skinner Co. of Boston, he founded the Hope-Jones Organ Co. (Tonawanda, N.Y.), which he sold in 1908 to the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. Hope-Jones, in his organ-building innovations, entirely abandoned the chorus and mutation stops and relied instead upon diapasons of vast scale on heavy-pressure wind, with reeds to match, backed up by huge-scaled flutes, tiny-scaled string stops, and powerful stops of his own invention called diaphones.

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