Wicks Direct-Electric Patents

United States Patent 1,403,930, titled ‘Valve action for organs’, was granted on January 17, 1922, to Louis J. Wick of Highland, Illinois, on an application filed November 28, 1919. It claims a pipe valve opened by direct electromagnetic actuation with no pneumatic motor in the path: when the magnet is energized, a pivoted armature swings, its curved arm crosses the face of the magnet core, and the valve is pulled away from its seat. It is the earliest of the four and the only one issued to Wick without an assignment to the company.

United States Patent 1,736,684, ‘Valve-operating mechanism for organs’, was filed March 14, 1928, and granted November 19, 1929, to Louis J. Wick as assignor to Wicks Pipe Organ Co. It claims an improved version of the same arrangement, in which the energized magnet draws a pivoted armature to open the air channel and a coil spring returns the armature to close the valve. The assignment is the first point at which one of these documents carries the company’s name rather than the inventor’s alone.

United States Patent 1,765,958, titled simply ‘Electromagnet’, was filed March 6, 1929, and granted June 24, 1930, to Louis J. Wick as assignor to Wicks Pipe Organ Co. It claims an organ action magnet wound with two coils: an inner insulated copper coil and an outer doubled-over insulated German-silver coil that serves as an integral spark absorber, which the patent states removes the need for separate condensers. The windings sit on a compressed-fiber sleeve with compressed-fiber end pieces under a bookbinder’s cloth covering. It is the only one of the four that claims the magnet rather than the valve, and like the others it says nothing about which magnets in which organs were built to it.

United States Patent 1,984,167, ‘Balanced valve for pipe organs’, was filed November 8, 1933, and granted December 11, 1934, to John F. Wick as assignor to Wicks Pipe Organ Co. It claims a valve with two opposed elements on a common stem, arranged so that one moves with the wind and the other against it; because the pressure on the two is balanced, less electromagnetic force is needed to move the valve. A bridge member across one port slows the closure, which the patent describes as avoiding popping, pounding and slamming noises. It is the only one of the four filed by John F. Wick and the last of the group.

The 1922 and 1929 patents both describe the same basic relationship: current through the action magnet pulls a pivoted armature, the armature pulls the pipe valve off its seat and admits wind to the pipe, and when the armature is released the valve closes, with no pneumatic motor anywhere between the magnet and the valve. The 1930 patent adds the magnet itself, and the 1934 patent changes the valve rather than the magnet, reducing the force the magnet must supply by balancing the wind pressure across two opposed valve elements. That is as far as this page takes the mechanism; what the arrangement means in practice, how it compares with electro-pneumatic action and what a direct-electric chest does and does not tell you are explained at Wicks DIRECT-ELECTRIC Action: Meaning, Boundaries, and Comparison.

The valve in both the 1922 and the 1929 patents is a laminated disk, not a metal plate: a lower disk of sole leather, a middle disk of soft felt and an upper disk of soft leather. The patented direct-electric valve therefore carries leather and felt facing material even though the action dispenses with the pneumatic motor. Anyone who has taken ‘direct-electric’ to mean an action with no leather in it will find that the two valve patents put leather and felt at the seat of the pipe valve; whether the instrument as a whole contains leather is a wider question answered at Wicks DIRECT-ELECTRIC Action: Meaning, Boundaries, and Comparison.

None of the four patents has been tied to a specific opus number, an opus range or a first installation. The patents can be dated as documents, from the first filing in 1919 to the last grant in 1934, but that is a chronology of paperwork, not of instruments. No factory-issued Wicks opus list, nameplate specification or full text of a DIRECT-ELECTRIC valve or action patent was publicly available online as of September 1, 2026, which says what is reachable in public rather than what survives in an archive. What factory paperwork is known to exist, and where it may be, is the subject of Wicks Factory Records and Opus Documentation.

The builder itself does not say which patent covers its valves. Its own website glossary, as read on September 1, 2026, describes the DIRECT-ELECTRIC action as using patented electromagnetic pipe valves and gives no patent number, jurisdiction or date. A patent on an action of the 1910s or 1920s would have expired long ago, so a present-tense statement that the valves are patented cannot be read, without a live patent number, as a claim of exclusive rights today. A secondary encyclopedia article on the company goes further and says the action was ‘invented, patented and trademarked’ and ‘created in 1916’, again without a patent number, and no primary document has been produced to corroborate that 1916 date. The two accounts stand side by side: neither names a document, and neither is a substitute for the four numbered patents above.

A patent date fixes when a document was filed or granted; it does not fix when an action entered production or when any organ was built. The company’s own history says the action was perfected ‘By 1914’, five years before the first filing; the encyclopedia account says ‘created in 1916’; the earliest dated Wicks publication on the action in the Organ Historical Society library is of 1919. Those are three different kinds of statement, a recollection, a summary and a publication date, and none of them is selected here; the dates and names question as a whole belongs to Wicks DIRECT-ELECTRIC Action: Meaning, Boundaries, and Comparison.

Nor does a direct-electric chest date itself. A Wicks instrument recorded in the Pipe Organ Database had its chests converted to Direct Electric action after a damage event, so the presence of direct-electric chests in a Wicks organ is not proof that they are original and is not a reliable basis for dating the action. One documented case shows that such conversions happen, not how often. What a nameplate, an opus number or a letter suffix does establish is worked through at Identifying and Dating Wicks Organs, Companies, and Opus Suffixes.

United States Patent 1,887,076, titled ‘Direct electric action for pipe organs’, is an Estey patent, not a Wicks patent. It was granted on November 8, 1932, to Warren Samuel Russell and assigned to the Estey Organ Company, and it covers a different arrangement: a bipolar magnet and a pivoted armature carrying a pallet. Its claims place the valve casing inside the pressurized wind chamber, mount the electromagnet on a bracket on that casing, set the armature alongside the magnet poles, close the casing port with a padded pallet that moves with the armature, and add both a light closing spring and an auxiliary quick-acting spring. The title is the trap: the phrase ‘direct electric action’ was not exclusive to Wicks, and nothing in this document describes Wicks magnet or valve construction.

United States Patent 3,379,085, ‘Operational circuitry for pipe organs’, filed in 1965 and granted in 1968, is invented and assigned to Howard A. Burton and is not a Wicks patent. It describes transistor key-and-stop switching, with diodes in series with the chest magnets to block sneak circuits, and it surfaces in searches about Wicks direct-electric switching, which is why it is named here. Which control systems actually appear in Wicks organs, and what replacing one involves, is the subject of Wicks Control-System Generations and Relay Replacement Decisions.

A contract does what a patent cannot: it names the instrument. The 1926 contract for Wicks Opus 633, quoted from the church’s archive in the instrument’s Pipe Organ Database record, specifies the action in the period’s own words: ‘The action is electric throughout with a separate and individual valve directly under each speaking pipe. The valves are of an electro magnetic type, and in an individual direct electric circuit with the contact of the corresponding key in the console’, and ‘The Chests are of the universal wind type.’ That language ties a described arrangement, an individual electromagnetic valve under each pipe, to one named organ in one year. It cites no patent number either, and it is quoted at second hand in a 2015 database note rather than read from the original document, but it connects the action to the instrument in a way no patent can.

What is inside a particular Wicks organ is settled by the organ and its own paperwork, not by the patent register. The patents record claimed designs; a contract or specification records what was ordered for a named instrument, a record of later work shows what was changed, and the chests themselves show what is there now.

The same database record that documents a later conversion to Direct Electric action is the reminder that the paperwork of later work can matter as much as the original order. Before any decision about the action, the documents that name the instrument, the contract, the specification and any record of later work, together with an inspection of the chests and a written account of what was found, are what close the question a patent leaves open. Where factory paperwork may be and how to ask for it is covered at Wicks Factory Records and Opus Documentation; the choice between keeping and replacing an original action is worked through at Preserving Versus Replacing Original Wicks Action.