Built during a two-year period by M.P. Möller Inc. of Hagerstown, Maryland, the four-manual pipe organ was installed in Wait Chapel in 1956. Installation required more than two months. At installation, the organ had 3,696 pipes, 62 stop controls, and 22 controls for the pedals. The organ, including its blower and 25-horsepower motor, weighed between 20 and 25 tons.
Due to problems with the console leather over the years and the difficulty of replacing obsolete mechanical parts in the organ's console, in 1997 (with the Möller Organ Company no longer in business), the Schantz Organ Company of Orrville, Ohio, was commissioned to build a new console for the Williams Organ. 
Installed during the summer of 1998, this handsome new console employs the latest in solid state technology. Built upon a movable platform, the console may now be moved to any location on the pulpit stage area. Concurrent with the installation of the new console was the successful acoustical renovation of Wait Chapel, thereby improving this space for all music making and worship.
With these additions and changes, the Williams Organ continues to serve the University as its primary musical instrument for convocations and organ instruction, as well as being utilized weekly by the Wake Forest Baptist Church for its worship services. Such active use would seem to have been the hope of the organ's original donors. The 1956 dedicatory program concludes with the following affirmation:
How does an organ work?
The Bellows
Although the most visible parts of the organ are the console and pipes, the instrument's sound actually begins in the electric blowers, which fill the bellows: large chambers of air underneath the organ's pipes. While the air is under pressure, the important factor is not the pressure of the air but the volume of it, with large volumes being necessary to "fuel" several sets of pipes at once to produce colorful and dynamic choruses of sound. Before the electrification of the organ, the bellows had to be pumped by hand, as was the case for the historic Tannenberg Organ in Home Moravian Church in the nearby Old Salem village. Now, of course, organs have electric blowers to fill the bellows.
The Pipes
Sets of pipes, usually located on top of the bellows, are the voice of the instrument. When the organist selects a set of pipes and a pitch or pitches to play, a valve opens at the bottom of a pipe or pipes to allow the air to escape through the pipe. 
The shape, length, width, and outlets of the pipe determine the pitch (how high or low the sound is) and the timbre (the "color" of the sound). Pipes are often made of metals such as tin, but can also be made of wood or even plastic. It is the wide variation of the pipes that allows them to produce a range of sounds, from the soft tones of strings (in fact, in the technical description below, you will notice that some of the pipes have names like "Viola") to sharper, reed-based tones (such as those of the organ's four trumpet ranks).
The pipes are arranged in ranks, or sets consisting of pipes with the same color of sound in the various pitches represented by the keys on the keyboard. These ranks are arranged into organs, which may sound strange; while the whole instrument is referred to collectively as an organ, that is also a term referring to the instrument's divisions. The Williams Organ has six divisions: Great, Swell, Choir, Bourdon, Positive, and Pedal. 
Some of the divisions, like the Great Organ, are open or "unenclosed," meaning that the only way to control the volume of the division is to add or remove ranks of pipes. Other divisions, like the Swell Organ, are enclosed behind shutters, allowing the organist to control volume by adding or removing ranks but also by opening and closing the shutters.
The Console
None of the exciting sounds of the organ will be heard without the operation of a console by a qualified organist. The console consists of manuals (keyboards played by hand), pedals (a keyboard played by the feet), stops (knobs which control each set of pipes), couplers (switches which connect the various divisions to the keyboards), and pistons ("memory buttons" that engage a certain set of stops and couplers, usually programmed by the organist).
Stops each represent one rank, or set of pipes with the same "color" of sound. When the stop is pulled out, that rank sounds on its corresponding keyboard, and when the stop is pushed in, the rank is literally "stopped" from sounding. An organist chooses combinations of stops to produce the appropriate sound for the music. The organist can use one or two soft stops to create a barely audible accompaniment or to play music transitioning a worship service from one part to the next, or the organist can "pull out all the stops" to create a full, powerful chorus.
The Manuals are the hand-operated keyboards of the organ. The Williams Organ has one manual keyboard each for the Bombarde, Swell, Great, and Choir organs and the manuals are referred to (from top to bottom) by those names.
The Couplers, located above the Bombarde manual (the top one), allow the organist to connect stops from one division to the keyboard of another division. For example, the organist might choose to couple stops from the Swell and Positive organs to the Great manual in order to play most of the organ from one place. She might also couple a solo stop from the Bombarde organ to the pedal keyboard to allow the solo melody to be played independently from an accompaniment played with the hands.
At right you can see three components of the console: the shutter controls and crescendo pedal, the foot-activated piston controls, and the pedal keyboard. The wide, black pedals in the upper left part of the picture are the shutter controls and the crescendo pedal. The shutter controls vary the opening of the shutters which cover the Swell, Choir, and Bombarde organs, enabling the organist to vary the volume from these divisions without varying the color of the sound. The crescendo pedal adds a pre-selected set of ranks and couplers to allow the organist to vary the power of the organ's sound without manually activating stops and couplers. This pedal is particularly useful when the organist is accompanying a choir. The piston controls, located to the right of the crescendo pedal, are one of two ways the organist may activate a pre-selected set of stops on one of the keyboards so as to change the color of the organ's sound rapidly. The thinner wooden pedals are the pedal keyboard, which plays the ranks of the Pedal organ and any ranks from other divisions which are coupled to it.
The organ is an extremely complex instrument, and organists must have several years of training beyond basic keyboarding skills (such as those used to play a piano) in order to manage the resources of an instrument like the Williams Organ. At Wake Forest, the organ is used for recitals and worship, but also for organ instruction by the university's organists through the Music Department.
Back to top