THE MAIN PEDAL DIVISION is unexpressive. It has forty-four stops and wind pressures of five to twenty-five inches. THE CHOIR is on five inches of wind pressure. THE GREAT DIVISION is on wind pressures of five to sixteen inches, and consists of unenclosed stops as well as a section enclosed with the Choir division. IN TWO EXPRESSION CHAMBERS, THE SWELL is on wind pressures of five to twenty-two and a half inches. All are under expression. One of these expression chambers houses the Original String division designed by George Ashdown Audsley—the first independent String organ ever found in a pipe organ. THE ENTIRE SOLO DIVISION is under expression, on a wind pressure of fifteen inches. THE ETHEREAL ORGAN IS POWERFUL, rich and full in tone, entirely expressive. It has twenty-one stops, and a wind pressure of twenty-five inches. It is located on the seventh floor. THE STRING ORGAN is entirely expressive, has eighty-seven manual stops and a wind pressure of fifteen to twenty-seven inches. It has a matching pedal of twenty-seven stops. Its tone is unusually rich and beautiful, producing at full volume a velvety carpet of lush string tone suggestive of hundreds of stringed instruments. Individual tablets enable the organist to reduce the sound to a gorgeous hush with a sweep of the stops. This division, with metal pipework by the famed Kimball company, occupies the largest space of any single organ chamber ever constructed. It is approximately sixty-seven feet long, twenty-six feet deep and sixteen feet high.

THE ORCHESTRAL, also with Kimball metal pipes, has pressures of fifteen and twenty inches and is entirely expressive. It has forty stops. THE ECHO DIVISION is located opposite the main organ, on the seventh floor. Entirely expressive, it has a wind pressure of five inches. THE PERCUSSION DIVISION is expressive and operates on pneumatic, vacuum and electric action. THE MAJOR CHIMES are usually referred to as "tower chimes" because they were especially made for outdoor tower-chime playing. The largest chime of this set, Note C, is twelve feet long, five inches in diameter, and weighs 600 pounds. It is struck by a leather-topped hammer four inches in diameter, the stroke of which is nine inches. It weighs eighteen pounds and has an impact of seventy-two pounds of pneumatic pressure. PULSATIONS OF THE TREMULANTS, two for each division, are controllable in ten stages by means of tremolo pulsation levers to the right and left of the music rack on the console. This device was invented and patented in the Wanamaker Organ Shop. It enables the organist to adjust the speed of an individual tremolo or of all the tremolos to suit the performer's taste. Thirty-six regulators furnish steady wind pressure from five to twenty-seven inches. The organ is electro-pneumatic throughout, requiring seven blowers totaling 168 horsepower.

Info on the David Fox Biography

PEDAL		75 ranks, 81 stops, 2,540 pipes
CHOIR		24 ranks, 19 stops, 1,452 pipes
GREAT		58 ranks, 43 stops, 3,634 pipes
SWELL		71 ranks, 51 stops, 4,422 pipes
SOLO		51 ranks, 35 stops, 3,640 pipes
ETHEREAL		24 ranks, 21 stops, 1,670 pipes
STRING		88 ranks, 87 stops, 6,340 pipes
STENTOR		3 ranks, 9 stops, 243 pipes
ORCHESTRAL		39 ranks, 40 stops, 2,811 pipes
ECHO		33 ranks, 22 stops, 2,013 pipes
Click here for the STOPLIST.

Dr. Irvin J. Morgan (1911-17) Mary E. Vogt (1917-66) Dr. Keith Chapman (1966-89) Peter Richard Conte (1989-present)

Like the Organ, the Eagle, also came from the St. Louis World's Fair, where it was part of the German Exhibit of Arts and Crafts. Made by the Armbruester Brothers in Frankfort, Germany, the Eagle is fashioned of Durana bronze from models by Berlin sculptor August Gaul. All of the heavy plates that form the inner structure, as well as the feathers and other surface features, were separately wrought by hand with chisel, file and hammer. Each individual feather on the head and body was carefully modeled and fitted into place. There are 1,600 feathers on the head alone, and 5,000 on the entire Eagle. The sculpture weighs 2,500 pounds and sits on a granite base. When brought to Wanamaker's it became the John Wanamaker chain's corporate trademark. The floor of the Grand Court had to be strengthened with girders to accommodate it. There is an old Philadelphia custom to rendezvous in Center City by saying "Meet me at the Eagle."

The deep-voiced bell that rings from the belfry of the PNB-First Union bank building on North Broad Street and Penn Square in Philadelphia was commissioned by Rodman Wanamaker in 1926 as a memorial to his father, John Wanamaker. Consequently, the bell is known as the Founder's Bell. It was also cast to celebrate the Sesqui-Centennial of the United States of America and the 50th Anniversary of The New Kind of Store, John Wanamaker's department store. The bell was cast by the distinguished Gillett and Johnston foundry in Croydon, England, a firm which had revived a method of tuning bells by shaving off some of the bronze at various places on the bell surface to make their sound more concordant. The completed bell, which sounds low "D," weighs 15 tons—one ton for each decade of American independence—and was the largest tuned bell in the world at the time of its casting. (Subsequently, slightly larger tuned bells were cast for the carillon of New York City's Riverside Church, also by Gillett and Johnston.) The Founder's Bell was originally placed on the roof of the Wanamaker Philadelphia store. Production delays caused its dedication to be postponed from the Fourth of July until New Year's Eve 1926-27. However, the roof location proved inadequate, and in the 1930s the Wanamaker management provided a belfry where the bell could be fully swung. It was erected atop Wanamaker's new men's store, originally known as the Lincoln-Liberty building and now called the PNB-First Union building. The Founder's Bell, whose majestic tone has been praised by Leopold Stokowski and many others, continues to ring the hours daily from its perch high above the city. Many people, incidentally, mistakenly believe the sound comes from nearby City Hall. Although there is no official policy, the managers of the real-estate firm that manages the PNB building occasionally take visitors to the belfry on appointment.