(b Bath, 10 Oct 1804; d Maidstone, 26 Nov 1879). English inventor and organ builder. He was the eldest son of Joseph Barker and nephew of Thomas Barker (‘Barker of Bath’), both of whom were artists. Originally an apothecary’s assistant in Bath, he worked briefly with an unnamed organ builder in London before returning to Bath about 1830 and setting up on his own account. After seeing a hydraulic press, he became interested in pneumatic actions, an elementary form of which had been used by Joseph Booth in 1827 at Attercliffe near Sheffield. In 1833 he was in correspondence with Matthew Camidge, the organist of York Minster, concerning his experimental apparatus, which at this stage seems to have consisted of a piston working in a small cylinder. He also offered it for use in the large organ at Birmingham Town Hall; it was not adopted (except possibly to operate the Carillon) but the organ builder William Hill assisted Barker to refine his device.
In 1835 David Hamilton used pneumatic action in his organ in St John’s Episcopal Church, Edinburgh. Barker meanwhile was in correspondence with Cavaillé-Coll, who invited him to Paris with a view to applying his own pneumatic lever in the construction of the St Denis organ. A French patent was taken out in 1839 and the success of the St Denis organ was followed by the application of Barker’s lever to other large Cavaillé-Coll instruments. After working for a time with Cavaillé-Coll, Barker became manager (contre-maître) of Daublaine–Callinet; this firm passed in 1845 to Ducroquet, for whom Barker supervised the building of the prize-winning instrument for the Great Exhibition (1851) and a new organ for St Eustache (1854) following the destruction by fire, accidently started by Barker himself, of the organ reconstructed by Daublaine–Callinet (1844).
Barker exhibited on his own account at the Paris Exposition (1855). Shortly after this the Ducroquet firm was acquired by Merklin, and in 1860 Barker went into partnership with Charles Verschneider (d 1865). About this time he became interested in the experiments with electric action performed by Albert Peschard (1836–1903) of Caen. In 1866 Barker completed the first successful electric action at Salon using the system patented by Peschard in 1864. Barker took out his own English patent in 1868 and granted Bryceson a sole concession to use it.
At the outbreak of the Franco–Prussian War in 1870, Barker emigrated to Dublin. There, he was comissioned to build a new organ for the Roman Catholic Cathedral, Marlborough Street, but despite the assistance of the American organ builder, Hilborne Roosevelt, it was not a success, and Barker died in 1879 in reduced circumstances.
Hopkinson-RimbaultO, 59
W. Pole: Musical Instruments in the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1851), 74–7
‘The Electric Organ’, Musical Standard (9 Jan 1869)
C. Pierre: Les facteurs d’instruments de musique (Paris, 1893/R), 225
J.W. Hinton: Story of the Electric Organ (London, 1909)
R.M. Roberts: ‘Charles Spackman Barker’, The Organ, xiii (1933–4), 186–9
J.I. Wedgwood: ‘Was Barker the Inventor of the Pneumatic Lever?’, The Organ, xiv (1934–5), 49–52
N.J. Thistlethwaite: The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge, 1990)
GUY OLDHAM, NICHOLAS THISTLETHWAITE