Entry #10. Waves

 

Hello all and welcome to my tenth and final post, for todays topic I will be talking about the origin of sound waves and their initial  discovery. Dating back to the year 1681 Robert Hooke, an English physicist, was the first to produce an actual sound wave of a known frequency. By using a rotating cog wheel Hooke was even able to measure the waves frequency, isn't that fascinating! But in the year 1696 A French physicist and mathematician who went by the name Joseph Sauveur coined the term acoustique (acoustics in English) for the so called "science of sound". Although these were very ground breaking discoveries we can't shy away from the humans who came before these geniuses. Aristotle a Greek philosopher who lived from 384 BC to 322 BC claimed that sound traveled in waves, he also claimed that the quality of sound would be unchanged and would travel as far as the waves reached. This is a very fascinating philosophy for someone with no concrete evidence or knowledge of the subject at all. We then move onto an Italian physicist who went by the name Gailileo Galilei, living from the year 1564 to 1642. Gailileo was in fact the first scientist to record the relationship between the frequency of the wave to the pitch it produces. His philosophy at the time was since sound waves produced by musical instruments vary in pitch, this was a significant discovery. After taking a chisel and scarping it against a brass plate he began to observe that the pitch of the screech varied directly with the spacing of the grooves. To just think for a second what life would be like without these types of people through ought history to really figure it out for the rest of us. Well that wraps up my tenth and final blog, I would like to thank you all out there for reading and keeping up with the blog and hope to write more later as my life progresses, till then!