THE SCIENCE AND APPLICATIONS OF ACOUSTICS - H. H. Arnold ...

6 1. A Capsule History of Acousticsconflict by embracing elements of both theories. Newton essentially squelched thewave theory until its revival by Thomas Young (1773–1829) and Augustin JeanFresnel (1788–1817), both of whom, independently of each other, elucidated theprinciple of interference. On his analysis of diffraction, Fresnel drew heavily onHuygen’s principle in which successive positions of a wavefront are establishedby the envelope of secondary wavelets.Armed with the analytical tools afforded by the advent of calculus by Newton andLeibniz, the French mathematical school treated problems of theoretical mechanics.Among the major contributors were Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), theBernoulli brothers James (1654–1705) and Johann (1667–1748), G. F. A. l ′ Hôpital(Marquis de St. Mesme) (1661–1704), Gabriel Cramer (1704–1752), LeonhardEuler (1707–1783), Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), and Daniel Bernoulli(1700–1783). And the next generation provided a further flowering of genius:Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), Pierre Simon Laplace (1749–1827), AdrianMarie Legendre (1736–1833), Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768–1830), andSiméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840). The nineteenth century was also dominatedby discoveries in electricity and magnetism by Michael Faraday (1791–1867),James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–1894), and bythe theory of elasticity, principally developed by Clause L. M. Navier (1785–1836), Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789–1857), Rudolf J. E. Clausius (1822–1888),and George Gabriel Stokes (1890–1909).These developments constituted the foundation for understanding the physicaland eventually the physiologcial aspects of acoustics. In the attempt to grasp thenature of musical sound, Simon Ohm (1789–1854) advanced the hypothesis thatthe ear perceived only a single, pure sinusoidal vibration and that each complexsound is resolved by the ear into its fundamental frequency and its harmonics.Hermann F. L. von Helmholtz (1821–1894) arguably deserves the credit for layingthe foundations of spectral analysis in his classic Lehre von den Tonempfindungen(Sensation of Sound). The monumental two-volume Theory of Sound, released in1877 and 1878 by the future Nobel laureate, Lord Rayleigh, laid down in a fairlycomplete fashion the theoretical foundations of acoustics.When the newly constructed Fogg Lecture Hall was opened in 1894 at HarvardUniversity, its acoustics was found to be so atrocious so as to render that facilityalmost useless. This prompted Harvard’s Board of Overseers to request thephysics department that something be done to rectify the situation. The task wasassigned to a young Harvard researcher, Wallace Clement Sabine (1868–1919),and he discovered soon enough that excessive reverberations tend to mask the lecturer’swords. In a series of papers (1900–1915) evolving from his studies of thelecture hall, he almost single-handedly elevated architectural acoustics to scientificstatus. Sabine helped establish the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories 3 at Geneva,Illinois. Just prior to his scheduled assumption of his duties at Riverbank, Sabinesuccumbed at the young age of 50 to cancer. His distant cousin, Paul Earls Sabine3 Riverbank is possibly the first research facility set up specifically for study and research in acoustics.