A Mechanical Trolley Organ with Clutch and Windshield

[Colin Pykett]

Not long ago our hosts undertook a meticulous restoration of the attractive and historic 1858 Walker organ at St Mary Ponsbourne in Hertfordshire. See http://www.npor.org.uk/NPORView.html?RI=H00315 on the NPOR.

 

By accident I came across a Netherlands website which also describes this instrument at http://www.orgelsite.nl/kerken68/ponsbourne.htm . As I do not read the language I asked Google to translate it, and it came up with the following:

 

https://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&u=http://www.orgelsite.nl/kerken68/ponsbourne.htm&prev=search

 

This describes a 'mechanical trolley organ with clutch and windshield' !! I am familiar with the Ponsbourne organ and can assure everyone that it does not have either accessory. Nevertheless I should like to know what the Netherlands site is saying, so if anyone can assist I shall be grateful.

 

And while on the subject, does anyone know anything about the George Kirby who is mentioned?

 

Many thanks.

 

CEP

[pwhodges]

"Clutch and windshield" looks like meaning "coupling/connection to the windchest". I.e. the top three keys of the pedalboard are dummies. "Mechanical trolley" is presumably just "mechanical action".

 

Paul

[Damian Beasley-Suffolk]

Google translate can be unintentionally funny, but this seems to be an unfortunately poor effort. However, artificial intelligence based on neural networks still has to be taught to the system, especially for specialist language, and mostly by users making many contributions to refine the context. I imagine that the language of pipe organs doesn't generate that much traffic.

 

Anyway, the natural, wet "intelligence" allegedly residing in the jelly located between my ears comes up with the following:

 

"A mechanical slider-chest organ by J W Walker from 1858. In 1961 the instrument was restored and enlarged with an independent pedal by George Kirby. The installed pedal board runs from C to g', (32 notes), but the coupler and the wind chest only go to e' (29 notes). The Swell Organ runs from Tenor C."

[Colin Pykett]

artificial intelligence based on neural networks still has to be taught to the system, especially for specialist language, and mostly by users making many contributions to refine the context. I imagine that the language of pipe organs doesn't generate that much traffic.

 

Thank you both for your replies - very useful. In my time I have worked on various aspects of AI, a technology whose time has still to arrive, and for that reason I shudder at the prospect of driverless cars (although observing the performance of some human drivers perhaps I ought to revise this point of view). Phone speech recognition systems are equally far behind the curve of acceptability (try calling BT to get through their forest of audio menus if you don't believe it), as are machine translation systems as this example has demonstrated.

 

CEP