Mortier

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Mortier is a well known organ manufacter from Antwerp, Belgium that made orchestrions, fairground organs, and mostly dance organs from 1898 until 1950. The company was founded by Theophiel Mortier.

The manufacture of Mortier organs began around 1900, in a period when the French and German organ industry was in full bloom. Theophiel Mortier was originally the manager of a dance hall, in which there was always a Gavioli (another organ company in France) organ playing. He made it a habit to sell the installed organ after a short while. He was fortunate enough most of the time to make a profit on selling these used organs. As time went by he became more and more an organ dealer and a very good customer of Gavioli. He set up a repair shop in order to provide maintenance and repair for the organs, which he had sold. The organ builder Guillaume Bax managed this shop.

Due to internal operations difficulties, Gavioli could after a while not deliver their orders and Mortier began to manufacture the dance organs himself. The company expanded after the First World War to a size where they employed 80 personnel and had a capacity to build about 20 large dance organs per year. No other manufacturer has matched the cubic meter volume of organs produced by Mortier. The company stayed active until 1948.