02. 110 (1954-5) Wurlitzer Electronic Piano

For the next duration, I will be uploading documentation on every model of Wurlitzer Electric Piano ever produced, chronologically.  Approximately 1 page per model, around 40 instruments total.  And then the accessories.  

This will take a while, as each page is a photo essay… and an essay.  In the meantime, if the instrument you are curious about isn’t here, I refer you to my complete list, on which these blog entries are based: Here.

The Wurlitzer Electronic Piano Model 110.  Wood & Brooks Action. This model, the first Wurlitzer electric piano to be marketed, is extremely rare; it was been replaced by the Model 111 within months. (It was preceded by the almost mythical and possibly unnamed Model 100, a prototype which was displayed, but may not have been sold.)

Update, 09/19/2024: The first serial number was 1000, and the last was 1265, according to a serial number document found by Tropical Fish in December 2022.  This would mean that roughly 266 were made, if no other items shared that number range.  However, it appears that some Model 111 instruments overlap with the range…. and the 110 amps might, as well. (Earliest 110 amp number I know of barely follows that range).  Given these complexities, the number produced might have been 200… or even closer to 133. And how many of those survive? Rare!

In color, above: A Model 110 restored by Fred DiLione and Jonathan Gusoff (original link here). (The legs are a modern stand.).  Fred has worked on two of these.  At least one has the date stamp “1254” on the side of the lowest key, which we might interpret to mean “December 1954.” Or, less likely, an action part produced in the 12th week of 1954?  As described further down the page, I have reason to believe that no Wurlitzer was sold in a store prior to June 1955 — at the very least, I can find no advertising for them prior to that date.  Given that Fred has supplied me with evidence of a Model 111 sold on July 25, 1955, I suspect that the 110’s and 111’s were sent to stores at roughly the same time.

Duke Ellington and his jazz orchestra recorded on a Wurlitzer Electronic Piano on May 18 and 19, 1955, for Capitol Records, at Universal Studios in Chicago (a very obscure session, and I’m not sure the Wurlitzer tracks were released at the time). This is the earliest recording session featuring a Wurlitzer that I have been able to find. Tracks included “Coquette”, “Discontented Blues”, “Once In A Blue Mood”, “Lady Be Good,” and “So Long.”  (The session can be found in its entirety on the out-of-print Mosiac collection “Complete Capitol Recordings Of Duke Ellington”, and boy would I love a copy.)  I presume this was a 110. Whether he bought it, was gifted or lent it, or whether it resided at the studio, is unknown.  By 1964, Ellington appeared in an ad promoting Wurlitzer standard pianos, and the the company may have encouraged this earlier session prior to the instruments being available on the general market.  If this link is working, it is a compilation from that historic session:

A manual exists, slightly less rare than the keyboard, as they continued using it, inappropriately, for the 111. “The 110 slides out of the case for servicing, as the top is fixed. The handle is also on the back, so the keys point down when carried as a suitcase.” [Fred DiLeone, EP Forum] The manual indicates a removable panel in the back, allowing access to the amp for replacing tubes.  The lead treble sustain brick of later 1950s models is not found here, though other smaller weights are attached at various spots. [says Fred, true of some 111’s too.] Piano sits on a table with wrought-iron legs. Chair, w similar legs, matches table.

Over the next 33 years, the “Wurlitzer Electronic Piano” would go through any number of radical design changes.  But certain basic concepts were constant, and present in this very first distributed model.  It was an electro-acoustic, amplified instrument that required a speaker or headphones to be heard above a whisper. The piano almost always consisted of 64 notes, skipping the top and bottom octaves of a standard piano.  The tones were always produced by a miniaturized piano action, including felt hammers hitting, not strings, but small, tone-producing, tuned spring-steel “reeds,” of successively shorter length, that vibrated in an electrostatic pickup. This length-scaling of the reeds was always exactly the same, even as width, thickness and shape/taper of the reeds changed. The sound evolved over the decades, but was always intrinsically similar in character, somewhere between “barking” and bell-like.  Although, unlike an organ or a synthesizer, the instrument didn’t have a variety of voices, its one sound was always capable of dynamics and musical expressiveness.

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Update, Sept 19, 2024. It has come to my attention that I have not explained in much detail what is going on under the hood of these first instruments (Models 110, 111 and 112). I don’t have the time today to go as deeply into this as I’d like. Suffice it to say, those familiar with the design of the extended 140/A/B series (1962-1968) or the 200/200A series (1968-1983) would be in for a bit of a shock if they tried to do a quick repair on one of these. While there are conceptual similarities here, the execution is quite different — and much more primitive. It is basically impossible to get one of these instruments to play as smoothly as a later model.

The schematic below tells some of the story, and at a later date I can fill in more details.

The action design here is pretty similar to what one will find on a 112 (and most 111’s), with at least one crucial difference: The damper adjustment is on the UNDERSIDE of the action (parts 9 and 10), which I would imagine makes this adjustment especially hard. I have not worked on such an instrument myself. I am guiding an owner of an early 111 through his restoration by phone, and his instrument has this difficulty on it.

The action of the 110, 111 and 112 is conceptually somewhat similar to the design introduced in 1962’s model 140, and retained, with some important changes through the 200 era (1968-1974) and 200A era (1974-1983).  It is perhaps more like these instruments than it is like the Pratt-Reed instruments of the later 1950’s (the 112A, the 120 and the 700.). But the execution is quite different.  Item #15, the fly or jack, is the biggest limitation compared to the later design.  It has no direct jack spring.  Instead, a spring (#30) serves to return the hammer, which pushes the jack back to its starting position.  It’s a rather clunky design, and players tend to have to fight the action here. In the 140 instruments and beyond, gravity returns the hammer, while the jack spring helps to buoy the hammer upwards towards the reed, creating a more responsive feel, and then directly returns the jack as the key lifts.  I could be wrong, but I think there is also no mechanism here by which the jack “catches” the hammer in the air before dropping it.  The hammer just plunks onto the jack until the key returns, and it is the gravity of the hammer that returns the jack.  (I’ll confirm the next time I work on one of these.)

The (side-mounted) sustain pedal was an option from the beginning, apparently — hence the “damper rod,” item #12 here — but it is only mentioned in “oh yeah”-style passing on page 8 of the manual, in a passage about disassembling the instrument: “3) Check to see that the pedal has been removed. (Pedal available as auxiliary equipment.)” The hole to accommodate the pedal is missing from some of the photos of the manual.

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This model was described as having a “Brown pebble-textured finish” (Owosso Argus Press, June 28, 1955) and a “Pebblelac finish” (Manual, p. 15). This look was retained for the briefly-produced 111.  As with all Wurlitzer Electronic Pianos produced in the 1950’s, this had a tube amp; a photo of this can be seen on the Model 111 page, as the same amp was retained for that model. (A transistorized solid state amp was an option starting in 1962; evidence suggests the last Wurlitzer tube amps were phased out at some point in 1965.)

In both instruments I know of, original hammer felts are a distinctive deep purple.

A March 1955 article by Kay Sherwood claims it will be available by “late spring,” and similar articles appear through May in papers in various targeted local markets.  There is also mention that it has been “market tested.”  Does that mean that the 110 was already out in the world?  In spite of this article, which claims that adjusting the bass and treble can make the 110 sounds like a variety of instruments, its amp has no built-in “tone” (eq) control. (nor does any other Wurlitzer Electric Piano.)

After an extensive internet search, the earliest newspaper ads i can find date from June 1955, so that may be when they first appeared for sale in stores.  The manual has a copyright date of 1955.

While Duke Ellington may have been the first to recording on a Wurlitzer Electronic Piano, jazz pianist-composer-bandleader-Saturnite Sun Ra was probably the first musician to have commercially released recordings with the instrument, including an early 1956 studio session or two. (There also exists an unreleased 1955 acetate from him on the instrument.)

Discographer Robert L. Campbell tells me that Sun Ra had bought his Wurlitzer by his October 1955 stint at the Grand Terrace Ballroom, and used it there. As we can see at 20 minutes into the short film “The Cry of Jazz,” (shot in 1957) his instrument was undeniably a 110. (We don’t hear the 110 in the film–the band is miming to tracks from 1956, and we hear a piano instead).

Sun Ra’s 110 can be heard, with a very flat F# reed, on the early 1956 track “Medicine for a Nightmare” (2 of the existing 3 versions, one of which may have been the 1956 Saturn single version); on a version of “A Call for all Demons”; on his backing to the eccentric, 1956-released Billie Hawkins single “Last Call for Love”; on “Springtime In Chicago,” and on a later-released outtake of the track “Super-Blonde,” re-titled “Supersonic Jazz.” It can be heard, retuned, on the slightly-later 1956 tracks “India,” “Sunology (pts 1 and 2), and at chipmunk-style double-speed on “Advice for Medics”, which were released on the 1957 LP “Super Sonic Jazz.”  It’s all over his next December 1956 sessions for “Sound of Joy.”  I am a little confused as to which of his 1956 tracks were released in 1956 — but the 1956 Billie Hawkins single alone gives Sun Ra a decent claim as the first released Wurlitzer track.  (I invite challenges!  I want to know the truth!)

Sun Ra’s band backing Billie Hawkins, “Last Call For Love” (possibly first commercially-released Wurlitzer recording.)

Sun Ra, “Medicine for a Nightmare” (single version –note flat F# reed, as in the above song):

Sun Ra, “Advice for Medics” (sped-up Wurlitzer solo):

Sun Ra, “India”:

If your interest is primarily in this specific model of Wurlitzer, I nonetheless encourage you to read my posts on the models 111, 112 and 112A. There is a lot of ground to cover, and I go into more detail about design features shared by ALL of these instruments on those pages.