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Donald J. Leslie (1911–2004)

Radio service engineer at Barker Brothers in Los Angeles (which sold and repaired Hammonds). Bought a Hammond in 1937, was disappointed by its dry sound at home — a pipe organ fills a room with sound from many spatially separated pipes, the Hammond came from one static speaker.

The invention

His fix: motion. After experimenting with speaker sizes and rotor speeds, he settled on a rotating horn (treble) plus a rotating drum/baffle (bass), exploiting the Doppler effect and amplitude modulation to mimic the shimmer of pipe ranks. First prototype famously lived in a closet.^[raw/articles/hammondorganco-hammond-story.md]

The feud

  • 1940: demonstrated to Laurens Hammond — rejected. Hammond even retooled console connectors to be "Leslie-proof"; Leslie worked around it quickly.
  • 1941: began manufacturing himself (Vibratone, Brittain, Hollywood, Crawford Speakers…; "Leslie Vibratone" from 1947). Slogan on the plates: "Pipe Voice of the Electric Organ" vs. Hammond's "Music's Most Glorious Voice".
  • Sold to CBS in 1965; Hammond bought the brand in 1980; Suzuki acquired it in 1992.^[raw/articles/wikipedia-leslie-speaker.md]

Ironically, Leslie never much liked Hammonds ("I hate those damn things") and sold his speakers for Wurlitzer, Conn, Thomas and Baldwin organs too — but jazz organists made the Hammond+Leslie pairing canonical. The publicity from Hammond's hostility probably helped him.^[raw/articles/wikipedia-leslie-speaker.md]