ANTECEDENTS
Pioneering Labs
ESOTERIC LAB PRECURSORS
First Thinktank * First Private Lab * First US Decryption
First Thinktank * First Private Lab * First US Decryption
Acoustic space is capable of simultaneity, superimposition, and nonlinearity, but above all, it resonates. "Resonance" can be seen as a form of causality, of course, but its causality is very different than that associated with visual space, because resonance allows things to respond to each other in a nonlinear fashion. Through resonance in a physical system, a small activity or event can gain a great deal of energy; for example, if I belted out a pitch that resonated with the unique acoustic characteristics of this room, the energy of my voice would be amplified by the environment. That's why some singers can shatter a glass with their voice: they hit the resonant frequency of the glass (which is a space and contains a space), making it vibrate to the point of shattering. Resonance is a very powerful analogy for understanding how various types of energies and spaces operate. Resonance is just one quality of acoustic space; another one is simultaneity.
Riverbank Labs, Geneva Illinois
Riverbanks Labs - Architectural Acoustics, Reverb Chamber, Tuning Forks, Resonance, Genetics, NSA Decryption, Levitation & Time Travel -
How a Seemingly Failed Levitation Machine Led to the Founding of NSA;
First Thinktank * First Privately Owned Research Laboratory * First US Decryptions
Original US Esoterics Lab & Thinktank
"Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times on the Riviera, or extravagant living. But they all get satiated. That’s why I stick to scientific experiments, spending money to discover valuable things that universities can’t afford. You never get sick of too much knowledge." --George Fabyan
"Less Noise; More Hearing": Geneva, Illinois. Riverbank Engineering Bldg. Reminiscent of Tibetan architecture, The Villa, 40 miles west of Chicago, is now a museum that houses some of what Fabyan collected. The Villa was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1907 (the Villa now serves as a museum full of photographs and memorabilia). In 1914, landscape architect Taro Otsuka designed Fabyan’s Japanese Garden. The garden was restored in 1971 and again in 1994, and is open to the public.
Many different research activities occurred at Riverbank, including decoding and deciphering enemy messages during World War I, deciphering alleged secret messages in the works of William Shakespeare, research in the field of architectural acoustics, groundbreaking research in the field of cryptology, fieldwork in the use of hand grenades and military trenches, research and development of tuning forks, and studies of human fitness and anatomy. The list is varied and fascinating. Teams of researchers lived and worked at Riverbank, devoting years of their lives to the furthering of science. Many scientists from around the nation and world have visited Riverbank and stayed at The Lodge. The United State’s military successes in World War I and World War II have a direct relevance to Riverbank. And Riverbank can be considered to be a direct lineal predecessor of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency.
As Friedman and his staff in the Riverbank Department of Codes and Ciphers worked on solving messages coming in from various federal agencies and foreign governments, they became the first unofficial cryptologic organization in the United States. It was still many months before Military Intelligence was formed as the nation’s first official cipher bureau. Friedman invented the words "cryptanalysis" and "cryptology", the first being code-breaking, and the latter being the overall term used to describe the science. In 1929, he became widely known as one of the world’s leading authorities on cryptology when the Encyclopedia Britannica published his article on "Codes and Ciphers." The Black Chamber was dissolved in 1929 and the Signal Intelligence Service was created with William Friedman as its first director. His first task was to set up an adequate program to provide training for officers in cryptology. The result was the Signal Intelligence School. He also wrote three textbooks on military cryptography for these courses. These comprise the finest, most lucid exposition of the solution of basic ciphers that has ever been published. The Black Chamber, otherwise known as MI-8 or Cipher Bureau, was the United States' first peacetime cryptanalytic organization, and a forerunner of the National Security Agency. The only prior codes and cypher organizations maintained by the US government had been some intermittent, and always abandoned, attempts by Armed Forces branches prior to World War I.
The American Black Chamber By Herbert Osborn Yardley
http://books.google.com/books?id=Y2GI32l-hXIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22The+Black+chamber%22&source=bll&ots=xg4UEBzEhn&sig=D4sT-ij1zkXbSmytjinLpUietnY&hl=en&ei=Kbe4TKPWPJDksQPH74D7Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&ved=0CEQQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q&f=false
Eventually, Fabyan’s estate grew to cover 600 acres and was the home to award-winning livestock and other animals. Fabyan imported scientists from the fields of plant genetics and acoustics as well as cryptography to his estate. The cryptographers were mainly there to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, but still ended up being the foundation for the NSA.Fabyan read in one of Bacon's works a description of a levitation device that allegedly worked on acoustic principles. He built one, but couldn't get it to fly, so he sent to Harvard University for some acoustic experts to help him. One discovery revealed by the code, previously known only to the Rosicrucians, is an acoustical levitating machine. A huge drum with piano strings stretched along its surface is rotated within an outer casing with corresponding strings. As the strings vibrate, the outer shell is made to levitate. It had been known for some time that Francis Bacon belonged to a secret society called the Rosicrucian Society. They believed in conducting scientific experiments that in those times was often considered witchcraft. Due to Bacon’s position with the Queen of England, he ran the Queen’s printing press, and had devised what was called a biliteral cipher utilizing wide and thin letters to represent the alphabet.
Colonel Fabyan also believed in the Baconian theory. Mrs. Gallup believed Bacon was the real Shakespeare for two reasons: 1) Bacon had invented the biliteral cipher and used it in printed publications, and 2) the original printed folios of Shakespeare’s plays used a variety of different typefaces.
So goes the theory; trouble is, it doesn't work. Fabyan invited a famous professor to his estate to study the problem. The professor made a few calculations, and convinced Fabyan there would never be enough sound energy to lift anything. Might the old gentleman be interested in underwriting some genuine scientific research, such as a reverberation chamber?
So began decades of discovery: Sabine's formula for sound absorption is still used in many standard acoustical tests, and the unit of absorption now bears his name, "sabin." The wonders recorded included sound absorbers that seemed to absorb more sound than fell upon them; an acoustical consultant, never hired for a certain concert hall project, who was criticized for its poor acoustics (while another acoustical consultant was praised for the excellent acoustics of the very same hall); the standard color of sound used in an acoustical laboratory; the required height, weight and shoes for a lady floor-walker; and much, much more, equally exotic.
The Colonel died May 17, 1936; his wife died two years later, and the executors of her will sold Riverbank to the Kane County Forest Preserve for $70,500. Various guests to the estate supposedly included Albert Einstein, P.T. Barnum and Wallace Clement Sabine (American physicist and pioneer founder of the field of architectural acoustics). The work in cryptology done there by William Friedman, work in acoustical research done by Wallace Clement and Paul (a distant cousin) Sabine, and Fabyan�s strange desire to prove that the works of Shakespeare were in fact not written by Shakespeare but contained Baconian ciphers. Elizabeth Wells Gallup studied Shakepeare’s First Folio to see if the differences in variations of type represented Bacon’s use of the biliteral cipher. One of the messages she deciphered was: "Queen Elizabeth is my true mother, and I am the lawful heir to the throne. Find the Cypher storie my books contain; it tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. F. Bacon" They also worked unsuccessfully on the inscrutable Voynich Manuscript.
One of the scientific experiments documented by Sir Francis Bacon was a levitating machine. The machine was a wooden tube with metal strings attached to it, around which fit another wooden tube with metal strings attached to the inside of it. The center tube was supposed to spin and by sympathetic vibration cause the strings on the outer tube to vibrate. The resonance from the striking would create a force field, which would levitate the outer tube off of the ground. Colonel Fabyan hired Bert Eisenhour, an engineer from Chicago, to construct this machine at Riverbank. Though the machine was constructed, it did not work. Eisenhour was convinced that the strings were not tuned properly, and suggested they consult someone knowledgeable in acoustics. Decipherment from Shakespeare's first folio produced the plans for the Baconian Acoustical Levitation Device, which Fabyan and his army managed to build. It was: A wooden tube with metal strings attached to it, around which fit another wooden tube with metal strings attached to the inside of it. The center tube was supposed to spin and by sympathetic vibration cause the strings on the outer tube to vibrate. The resonance from the striking would create a force field, which would levitate the outer tube off of the ground.
How a Seemingly Failed Levitation Machine Led to the Founding of NSA;
First Thinktank * First Privately Owned Research Laboratory * First US Decryptions
Original US Esoterics Lab & Thinktank
"Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times on the Riviera, or extravagant living. But they all get satiated. That’s why I stick to scientific experiments, spending money to discover valuable things that universities can’t afford. You never get sick of too much knowledge." --George Fabyan
"Less Noise; More Hearing": Geneva, Illinois. Riverbank Engineering Bldg. Reminiscent of Tibetan architecture, The Villa, 40 miles west of Chicago, is now a museum that houses some of what Fabyan collected. The Villa was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1907 (the Villa now serves as a museum full of photographs and memorabilia). In 1914, landscape architect Taro Otsuka designed Fabyan’s Japanese Garden. The garden was restored in 1971 and again in 1994, and is open to the public.
Many different research activities occurred at Riverbank, including decoding and deciphering enemy messages during World War I, deciphering alleged secret messages in the works of William Shakespeare, research in the field of architectural acoustics, groundbreaking research in the field of cryptology, fieldwork in the use of hand grenades and military trenches, research and development of tuning forks, and studies of human fitness and anatomy. The list is varied and fascinating. Teams of researchers lived and worked at Riverbank, devoting years of their lives to the furthering of science. Many scientists from around the nation and world have visited Riverbank and stayed at The Lodge. The United State’s military successes in World War I and World War II have a direct relevance to Riverbank. And Riverbank can be considered to be a direct lineal predecessor of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency.
As Friedman and his staff in the Riverbank Department of Codes and Ciphers worked on solving messages coming in from various federal agencies and foreign governments, they became the first unofficial cryptologic organization in the United States. It was still many months before Military Intelligence was formed as the nation’s first official cipher bureau. Friedman invented the words "cryptanalysis" and "cryptology", the first being code-breaking, and the latter being the overall term used to describe the science. In 1929, he became widely known as one of the world’s leading authorities on cryptology when the Encyclopedia Britannica published his article on "Codes and Ciphers." The Black Chamber was dissolved in 1929 and the Signal Intelligence Service was created with William Friedman as its first director. His first task was to set up an adequate program to provide training for officers in cryptology. The result was the Signal Intelligence School. He also wrote three textbooks on military cryptography for these courses. These comprise the finest, most lucid exposition of the solution of basic ciphers that has ever been published. The Black Chamber, otherwise known as MI-8 or Cipher Bureau, was the United States' first peacetime cryptanalytic organization, and a forerunner of the National Security Agency. The only prior codes and cypher organizations maintained by the US government had been some intermittent, and always abandoned, attempts by Armed Forces branches prior to World War I.
The American Black Chamber By Herbert Osborn Yardley
http://books.google.com/books?id=Y2GI32l-hXIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22The+Black+chamber%22&source=bll&ots=xg4UEBzEhn&sig=D4sT-ij1zkXbSmytjinLpUietnY&hl=en&ei=Kbe4TKPWPJDksQPH74D7Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=11&ved=0CEQQ6AEwCg#v=onepage&q&f=false
Eventually, Fabyan’s estate grew to cover 600 acres and was the home to award-winning livestock and other animals. Fabyan imported scientists from the fields of plant genetics and acoustics as well as cryptography to his estate. The cryptographers were mainly there to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, but still ended up being the foundation for the NSA.Fabyan read in one of Bacon's works a description of a levitation device that allegedly worked on acoustic principles. He built one, but couldn't get it to fly, so he sent to Harvard University for some acoustic experts to help him. One discovery revealed by the code, previously known only to the Rosicrucians, is an acoustical levitating machine. A huge drum with piano strings stretched along its surface is rotated within an outer casing with corresponding strings. As the strings vibrate, the outer shell is made to levitate. It had been known for some time that Francis Bacon belonged to a secret society called the Rosicrucian Society. They believed in conducting scientific experiments that in those times was often considered witchcraft. Due to Bacon’s position with the Queen of England, he ran the Queen’s printing press, and had devised what was called a biliteral cipher utilizing wide and thin letters to represent the alphabet.
Colonel Fabyan also believed in the Baconian theory. Mrs. Gallup believed Bacon was the real Shakespeare for two reasons: 1) Bacon had invented the biliteral cipher and used it in printed publications, and 2) the original printed folios of Shakespeare’s plays used a variety of different typefaces.
So goes the theory; trouble is, it doesn't work. Fabyan invited a famous professor to his estate to study the problem. The professor made a few calculations, and convinced Fabyan there would never be enough sound energy to lift anything. Might the old gentleman be interested in underwriting some genuine scientific research, such as a reverberation chamber?
So began decades of discovery: Sabine's formula for sound absorption is still used in many standard acoustical tests, and the unit of absorption now bears his name, "sabin." The wonders recorded included sound absorbers that seemed to absorb more sound than fell upon them; an acoustical consultant, never hired for a certain concert hall project, who was criticized for its poor acoustics (while another acoustical consultant was praised for the excellent acoustics of the very same hall); the standard color of sound used in an acoustical laboratory; the required height, weight and shoes for a lady floor-walker; and much, much more, equally exotic.
The Colonel died May 17, 1936; his wife died two years later, and the executors of her will sold Riverbank to the Kane County Forest Preserve for $70,500. Various guests to the estate supposedly included Albert Einstein, P.T. Barnum and Wallace Clement Sabine (American physicist and pioneer founder of the field of architectural acoustics). The work in cryptology done there by William Friedman, work in acoustical research done by Wallace Clement and Paul (a distant cousin) Sabine, and Fabyan�s strange desire to prove that the works of Shakespeare were in fact not written by Shakespeare but contained Baconian ciphers. Elizabeth Wells Gallup studied Shakepeare’s First Folio to see if the differences in variations of type represented Bacon’s use of the biliteral cipher. One of the messages she deciphered was: "Queen Elizabeth is my true mother, and I am the lawful heir to the throne. Find the Cypher storie my books contain; it tells great secrets, every one of which, if imparted openly, would forfeit my life. F. Bacon" They also worked unsuccessfully on the inscrutable Voynich Manuscript.
One of the scientific experiments documented by Sir Francis Bacon was a levitating machine. The machine was a wooden tube with metal strings attached to it, around which fit another wooden tube with metal strings attached to the inside of it. The center tube was supposed to spin and by sympathetic vibration cause the strings on the outer tube to vibrate. The resonance from the striking would create a force field, which would levitate the outer tube off of the ground. Colonel Fabyan hired Bert Eisenhour, an engineer from Chicago, to construct this machine at Riverbank. Though the machine was constructed, it did not work. Eisenhour was convinced that the strings were not tuned properly, and suggested they consult someone knowledgeable in acoustics. Decipherment from Shakespeare's first folio produced the plans for the Baconian Acoustical Levitation Device, which Fabyan and his army managed to build. It was: A wooden tube with metal strings attached to it, around which fit another wooden tube with metal strings attached to the inside of it. The center tube was supposed to spin and by sympathetic vibration cause the strings on the outer tube to vibrate. The resonance from the striking would create a force field, which would levitate the outer tube off of the ground.
Levitation & Acoustics
STONE: I did find evidence and a wood model of a device at the Geneva History Center of a "Baconian levitation device." It reportedly was workable, in principle. It is only a few steps to time travel. The Time travel which was developed by DARPA and the CIA after WW II was based on specialized music at The Vatican. (Also a form of acoustics) Chronovision came from the Vatican based music and Enrico Fermi. It is possible that time travel was also invented earlier at Riverbank Labs as there is a similarity to acousics and music. It does appear that levitation was also developed there. There is a relationship between standing waves and musical instruments. Resonance is a fundamental principle from micro to macrocosm as are harmonics. Musical tones are produced by musical instruments, or by the voice, which, from a physics perspective, is a very complex wind instrument. So the physics of music is the physics of the kinds of sounds these instruments can make. What kinds of sounds are these? They are tones caused by standing waves produced in or on the instrument. So the properties of these standing waves, which are always produced in very specific groups, or series, have far-reaching effects on music theory.
Most sound waves, including the musical sounds that actually reach our ears, are not standing waves. Normally, when something makes a wave, the wave travels outward, gradually spreading out and losing strength, like the waves moving away from a pebble dropped into a pond. But when the wave encounters something, it can bounce (reflection) or be bent (refraction). In fact, you can "trap" waves by making them bounce back and forth between two or more surfaces. Musical instruments take advantage of this; they produce pitches by trapping sound waves. Why are trapped waves useful for music? Any bunch of sound waves will produce some sort of noise. But to be a tone - a sound with a particular pitch - a group of sound waves has to be very regular, all exactly the same distance apart. That's why we can talk about the frequency and wavelength of tones.
Figure 1: A noise is a jumble of sound waves. A tone is a very regular set of waves, all the same size and same distance apart.Figure 1 (NoisevsTone.png)
So how can you produce a tone? Let's say you have a sound wave trap (for now, don't worry about what it looks like), and you keep sending more sound waves into it. Picture a lot of pebbles being dropped into a very small pool. As the waves start reflecting off the edges of the pond, they interfere with the new waves, making a jumble of waves that partly cancel each other out and mostly just roils the pond - noise. But what if you could arrange the waves so that reflecting waves, instead of cancelling out the new waves, would reinforce them? The high parts of the reflected waves would meet the high parts of the oncoming waves and make them even higher. The low parts of the reflected waves would meet the low parts of the oncoming waves and make them even lower. Instead of a roiled mess of waves cancelling each other out, you would have a pond of perfectly ordered waves, with high points and low points appearing regularly at the same spots again and again. To help you imagine this, here are animations of a single wave reflecting back and forth and standing waves.
This sort of orderliness is actually hard to get from water waves, but relatively easy to get in sound waves, so that several completely different types of sound wave "containers" have been developed into musical instruments. The two most common - strings and hollow tubes - will be discussed below, but first let's finish discussing what makes a good standing wave container, and how this affects music theory. In order to get the necessary constant reinforcement, the container has to be the perfect size (length) for a certain wavelength, so that waves bouncing back or being produced at each end reinforce each other, instead of interfering with each other and cancelling each other out. And it really helps to keep the container very narrow, so that you don't have to worry about waves bouncing off the sides and complicating things. So you have a bunch of regularly-spaced waves that are trapped, bouncing back and forth in a container that fits their wavelength perfectly. If you could watch these waves, it would not even look as if they are traveling back and forth. Instead, waves would seem to be appearing and disappearing regularly at exactly the same spots, so these trapped waves are called standing waves.
Enrico Fermi was involved in the development. Riverbank was for many years the leading acoustics testing facility in the world. So that fits in with the time travel story. Riverbank is operated or maintained now by a medium sized high tech company in Tyson's Corner. The CEO was formerly the President of Illinois Institute of Technology which is closely linked to Riverbank. I know most of the senior Execs of the company of which a number are retired Navy and Army officers. The CEO even calls his own home Villa.
Iona Miller reports from a 2008 contact with Black Swan "Julian West": "This is utmost importance to one of my own obsessive investigations. My paternal grandfather worked at the legendary Riverbank Labs for the infamous Col George Fabyan. One of the many controversial/occult studies undertaken at Riverbank was the attempt to prove that Shakespeare was Bacon. (Elizebeth Friedman, for example, was one of Fabyan's most important colleagues. It is through her work that a connection can be established between Fabyan and Atlantis-scholar Ignatius Donnelly.) Also conducted at Riverbank: Experiments in teleportation and acoustic time-travel via the use of acoustics.
Quantum teleportation of electrons in quantum wires with surface acoustic waves. lionization and trigger the formation of ion-acoustic oscillations. The external triggers may initiate spontaneous teleportation.
In 1931, Charles Fort, an American writer, tried to describe the random disappearances and appearances of different anomalies. He felt that these sudden disappearances and appearances were connected and therefore felt that they were "teleporting." While he came up with this theory to try and explain why certain paranormal phenomena acted, many suggest that Fort probably didn't subscribe to the theory and was using it as a way of suggesting mainstream science didn't provide enough information on why these phenomena happened.
Dematerialising This is the transmission of data from one area and then the reconstruction of that object at its final destination. This is a theory that is presented in Star Trek when the individuals are "beamed down" to the planet. While the uncertainty principle suggests that humans are unable to be dematerialized because rebuilding their body as perfectly as they had previously been is nearly impossible.
However, in 1998, scientists at Caltech were able to make a true teleportation occur. This resulted in energy being transmitted from one point to another with a distance of about one meter. While the scientists admit that it was only one meter, they argue that they feel they could make the energy transmit to distances much larger.
Dimensional Teleportation This theory of teleportation suggests that an object existing in one universe leaves that universe, enters another one and then returns to the original, but in a different place. However, this theory is not considered often because it goes against the argument that time travel is not possible.
Wormhole According to some, a wormhole is a shortcut through time and space. It is suggested that an individual could go into a wormhole and this would be the "effective" method of getting from point A to point B without needing any form of time travel machines. However, little is known about whether these wormholes actually exist or not.
Is Teleportation Possible? Teleportation has always been a sign of intrigue in the science fiction world; however, there is still little research available to suggest whether teleportation is actually possible. There have been successful experiments, though, that suggest that teleportation is possible. However, since this is only energy, it is argued that it would take a considerable amount of time to create a method of teleporting an individual. Even then, there are so many theories that suggest that it is impossible because regnerating a human would be nearly impossible.
My grandfather had a very old set of Shakespeare's complete works (heavily annotated in more than one handwriting), which is now unfortunately lost, due to the ignorance and carelessness of his widow. (He never discussed the true nature of his work with his family; I myself have spent free time over several years just beginning to gather some real facts together (--discovering your work, linking Bacon to Germain, may be a big breakthrough in this research into the true nature and import of the experimental research conducted at Riverbank)). I also have in my own possession a few artifacts from Fabyan's estate, which came down from my grandfather."
She began investigating Riverbank Labs in 2006 with another high IQ MRU alumni with intelligence connections, (a former military intel internal security officer) responding to questions about the NSA cryptographer in Dan Brown's proposal on "Solomon's Key" which appeared later as the book "Lost Symbol." The father of his childhood friend "disposed of the incriminating walkin vaults in old NSA HQ at Riverbank Labs....the first overt attempt to voluntarily recruit me was Jan 4, 1967 at that same RIVERBANKLABS!" "I wasn't excited about the spiel Carl apparently agreed to. I had been warned two years previously by Dale Williams, son of Riverbank director, and also in 6th grade by Mrs. Jones former OSS cipherhead. I took those warnings lightly till personnel got used up due to Viet Nam and TEXACO linked side of NSA started using heavier tactics like extortion, threats and financial incentives. The author, William Shirer and son in law of Joe McCarthy (William Tierney) were both close friends of Friedman but never disclosed that, as far as i know. Shirer almost killed himself because he thought nobody would read Rise and Fall of Third Reich; he was also an associate of NSA/Norris at Tribune. I am pleased to contest any difference between what i say and NSA official version , with perfect confidence. They probably they won't even try. You might see that i fill in the large blank spots in official history." "Don't ever think that NSA began in 1952. I've seen their charter and it isn't the public one. Until 1970, NSA considered themselves the real OSS and they were run until 1990 by about 10 military men most of whom were among the few who managed to fight back effectively on Dec 7, 1941. They considered NSA Directors and US Presidents to be hired help and figureheads. BTW, Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a cousin of Dan Quayle's wife."
Long Range Acoustic Devices are now used for crowd control along with other Directed Energy Weapons (DEW). Ultrasound is cyclic sound pressure with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing. Although this limit varies from person to person, it is approximately 20 kilohertz (20,000 hertz) in healthy, young adults and thus, 20 kHz serves as a useful lower limit in describing ultrasound. The production of ultrasound is used in many different fields, typically to penetrate a medium and measure the reflection signature or supply focused energy. The reflection signature can reveal details about the inner structure of the medium, a property also used by animals such as bats for hunting. The most well known application of ultrasound is its use in sonography to produce pictures of foetuses in the human womb. There are a vast number of other applications as well.[
Most sound waves, including the musical sounds that actually reach our ears, are not standing waves. Normally, when something makes a wave, the wave travels outward, gradually spreading out and losing strength, like the waves moving away from a pebble dropped into a pond. But when the wave encounters something, it can bounce (reflection) or be bent (refraction). In fact, you can "trap" waves by making them bounce back and forth between two or more surfaces. Musical instruments take advantage of this; they produce pitches by trapping sound waves. Why are trapped waves useful for music? Any bunch of sound waves will produce some sort of noise. But to be a tone - a sound with a particular pitch - a group of sound waves has to be very regular, all exactly the same distance apart. That's why we can talk about the frequency and wavelength of tones.
Figure 1: A noise is a jumble of sound waves. A tone is a very regular set of waves, all the same size and same distance apart.Figure 1 (NoisevsTone.png)
So how can you produce a tone? Let's say you have a sound wave trap (for now, don't worry about what it looks like), and you keep sending more sound waves into it. Picture a lot of pebbles being dropped into a very small pool. As the waves start reflecting off the edges of the pond, they interfere with the new waves, making a jumble of waves that partly cancel each other out and mostly just roils the pond - noise. But what if you could arrange the waves so that reflecting waves, instead of cancelling out the new waves, would reinforce them? The high parts of the reflected waves would meet the high parts of the oncoming waves and make them even higher. The low parts of the reflected waves would meet the low parts of the oncoming waves and make them even lower. Instead of a roiled mess of waves cancelling each other out, you would have a pond of perfectly ordered waves, with high points and low points appearing regularly at the same spots again and again. To help you imagine this, here are animations of a single wave reflecting back and forth and standing waves.
This sort of orderliness is actually hard to get from water waves, but relatively easy to get in sound waves, so that several completely different types of sound wave "containers" have been developed into musical instruments. The two most common - strings and hollow tubes - will be discussed below, but first let's finish discussing what makes a good standing wave container, and how this affects music theory. In order to get the necessary constant reinforcement, the container has to be the perfect size (length) for a certain wavelength, so that waves bouncing back or being produced at each end reinforce each other, instead of interfering with each other and cancelling each other out. And it really helps to keep the container very narrow, so that you don't have to worry about waves bouncing off the sides and complicating things. So you have a bunch of regularly-spaced waves that are trapped, bouncing back and forth in a container that fits their wavelength perfectly. If you could watch these waves, it would not even look as if they are traveling back and forth. Instead, waves would seem to be appearing and disappearing regularly at exactly the same spots, so these trapped waves are called standing waves.
Enrico Fermi was involved in the development. Riverbank was for many years the leading acoustics testing facility in the world. So that fits in with the time travel story. Riverbank is operated or maintained now by a medium sized high tech company in Tyson's Corner. The CEO was formerly the President of Illinois Institute of Technology which is closely linked to Riverbank. I know most of the senior Execs of the company of which a number are retired Navy and Army officers. The CEO even calls his own home Villa.
Iona Miller reports from a 2008 contact with Black Swan "Julian West": "This is utmost importance to one of my own obsessive investigations. My paternal grandfather worked at the legendary Riverbank Labs for the infamous Col George Fabyan. One of the many controversial/occult studies undertaken at Riverbank was the attempt to prove that Shakespeare was Bacon. (Elizebeth Friedman, for example, was one of Fabyan's most important colleagues. It is through her work that a connection can be established between Fabyan and Atlantis-scholar Ignatius Donnelly.) Also conducted at Riverbank: Experiments in teleportation and acoustic time-travel via the use of acoustics.
Quantum teleportation of electrons in quantum wires with surface acoustic waves. lionization and trigger the formation of ion-acoustic oscillations. The external triggers may initiate spontaneous teleportation.
In 1931, Charles Fort, an American writer, tried to describe the random disappearances and appearances of different anomalies. He felt that these sudden disappearances and appearances were connected and therefore felt that they were "teleporting." While he came up with this theory to try and explain why certain paranormal phenomena acted, many suggest that Fort probably didn't subscribe to the theory and was using it as a way of suggesting mainstream science didn't provide enough information on why these phenomena happened.
Dematerialising This is the transmission of data from one area and then the reconstruction of that object at its final destination. This is a theory that is presented in Star Trek when the individuals are "beamed down" to the planet. While the uncertainty principle suggests that humans are unable to be dematerialized because rebuilding their body as perfectly as they had previously been is nearly impossible.
However, in 1998, scientists at Caltech were able to make a true teleportation occur. This resulted in energy being transmitted from one point to another with a distance of about one meter. While the scientists admit that it was only one meter, they argue that they feel they could make the energy transmit to distances much larger.
Dimensional Teleportation This theory of teleportation suggests that an object existing in one universe leaves that universe, enters another one and then returns to the original, but in a different place. However, this theory is not considered often because it goes against the argument that time travel is not possible.
Wormhole According to some, a wormhole is a shortcut through time and space. It is suggested that an individual could go into a wormhole and this would be the "effective" method of getting from point A to point B without needing any form of time travel machines. However, little is known about whether these wormholes actually exist or not.
Is Teleportation Possible? Teleportation has always been a sign of intrigue in the science fiction world; however, there is still little research available to suggest whether teleportation is actually possible. There have been successful experiments, though, that suggest that teleportation is possible. However, since this is only energy, it is argued that it would take a considerable amount of time to create a method of teleporting an individual. Even then, there are so many theories that suggest that it is impossible because regnerating a human would be nearly impossible.
My grandfather had a very old set of Shakespeare's complete works (heavily annotated in more than one handwriting), which is now unfortunately lost, due to the ignorance and carelessness of his widow. (He never discussed the true nature of his work with his family; I myself have spent free time over several years just beginning to gather some real facts together (--discovering your work, linking Bacon to Germain, may be a big breakthrough in this research into the true nature and import of the experimental research conducted at Riverbank)). I also have in my own possession a few artifacts from Fabyan's estate, which came down from my grandfather."
She began investigating Riverbank Labs in 2006 with another high IQ MRU alumni with intelligence connections, (a former military intel internal security officer) responding to questions about the NSA cryptographer in Dan Brown's proposal on "Solomon's Key" which appeared later as the book "Lost Symbol." The father of his childhood friend "disposed of the incriminating walkin vaults in old NSA HQ at Riverbank Labs....the first overt attempt to voluntarily recruit me was Jan 4, 1967 at that same RIVERBANKLABS!" "I wasn't excited about the spiel Carl apparently agreed to. I had been warned two years previously by Dale Williams, son of Riverbank director, and also in 6th grade by Mrs. Jones former OSS cipherhead. I took those warnings lightly till personnel got used up due to Viet Nam and TEXACO linked side of NSA started using heavier tactics like extortion, threats and financial incentives. The author, William Shirer and son in law of Joe McCarthy (William Tierney) were both close friends of Friedman but never disclosed that, as far as i know. Shirer almost killed himself because he thought nobody would read Rise and Fall of Third Reich; he was also an associate of NSA/Norris at Tribune. I am pleased to contest any difference between what i say and NSA official version , with perfect confidence. They probably they won't even try. You might see that i fill in the large blank spots in official history." "Don't ever think that NSA began in 1952. I've seen their charter and it isn't the public one. Until 1970, NSA considered themselves the real OSS and they were run until 1990 by about 10 military men most of whom were among the few who managed to fight back effectively on Dec 7, 1941. They considered NSA Directors and US Presidents to be hired help and figureheads. BTW, Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a cousin of Dan Quayle's wife."
Long Range Acoustic Devices are now used for crowd control along with other Directed Energy Weapons (DEW). Ultrasound is cyclic sound pressure with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing. Although this limit varies from person to person, it is approximately 20 kilohertz (20,000 hertz) in healthy, young adults and thus, 20 kHz serves as a useful lower limit in describing ultrasound. The production of ultrasound is used in many different fields, typically to penetrate a medium and measure the reflection signature or supply focused energy. The reflection signature can reveal details about the inner structure of the medium, a property also used by animals such as bats for hunting. The most well known application of ultrasound is its use in sonography to produce pictures of foetuses in the human womb. There are a vast number of other applications as well.[
NSA
DEAN OF CRYPTOLOGY - National Security Agency Bust of Friedman on display at the National Cryptologic Museum, where he is identified as the "Dean of American Cryptology". Following World War II, Friedman remained in government signals intelligence. In 1949 he became head of the cryptographic division of the newly-formed Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and in 1952 became chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) when it was formed to take over from AFSA. Friedman produced a classic series of textbooks, "Military Cryptanalysis", which was used to train NSA students. (These were revised and extended, under the title "Military Cryptanalytics", by Friedman's assistant and successor Lambros D. Callimahos, and used to train many additional cryptanalysts.) During his early years at NSA, he encouraged it to develop what was probably the first super-computers, although he was never convinced a machine could have the "insight" of a human mind.
Friedman retired in 1956 and, with his wife, turned his attention to the problem that had originally brought them together: examining Bacon's supposed codes. Together they wrote a book entitled The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare which won a prize from the Folger Library and was published under the title The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. The book demonstrated flaws in Gallup's work and in that of others who sought hidden ciphers in Shakespeare's work.
At NSA's request Friedman prepared Six Lectures Concerning Cryptography and Cryptanalysis, which he delivered at NSA. But later the Agency, concerned about security, confiscated the reference materials from Friedman's home.
Friedman retired in 1956 and, with his wife, turned his attention to the problem that had originally brought them together: examining Bacon's supposed codes. Together they wrote a book entitled The Cryptologist Looks at Shakespeare which won a prize from the Folger Library and was published under the title The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. The book demonstrated flaws in Gallup's work and in that of others who sought hidden ciphers in Shakespeare's work.
At NSA's request Friedman prepared Six Lectures Concerning Cryptography and Cryptanalysis, which he delivered at NSA. But later the Agency, concerned about security, confiscated the reference materials from Friedman's home.
Acoustic Levitation - Nonlinear Sound
Acoustic Levitation: While the Levitation Machine may have never been operational, the groundwork for the principles of acoustic levitation were laid at Riverbank Labs. Acoustic levitation is a method for suspending matter in a medium by using acoustic radiation pressure from intense sound waves in the medium. Acoustic levitation is possible because of the non-linear effects of intense sound waves.
The idea that something so intangible can lift objects can seem unbelievable, but it's a real phenomenon. Acoustic levitation takes advantage of the properties of sound to cause solids, liquids and heavy gases to float. The process can take place in normal or reduced gravity. In other words, sound can levitate objects on Earth or in gas-filled enclosures in space. Scientists have developed a sound generator so powerful its shock waves can stun, and even kill people. Another group of researchers have developed another unusual application for sound: a method of "acoustic levitation" that could help maintain colonies on Mars or the moon by using high-pitched sound waves to remove alien dust.
Wired explains,Blasting a high-pitched noise from a tweeter into a pipe that focuses the sound waves can create enough pressure to lift troublesome alien dust off surfaces, according to a study published January in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Extra-terrestrial missions have been plagued by dust and debris, which cling to rovers and astronauts because lunar and Martian environments lack the Earth's water or atmosphere that can displace the particles.
According to Wired, Electrostatic charging from solar winds and UV radiation on the Moon makes this sharp dust cling to everything, including astronaut suits where it can work its way through the glove air locks. It also sticks to the solar panels that power rovers and other instruments.
See acoustic levitation for yourself in the video below! Using only sound waves, the scientists are able to lift mock "Martian and lunar dust" off of a solar panel. Cool!
WATCH: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/acoustic-levitation-stere_n_429558.html
To understand how acoustic levitation works, you first need to know a little about gravity, air and sound. First, gravity is a force that causes objects to attract one another. The simplest way to understand gravity is through Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation. This law states that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle. The more massive an object is, the more strongly it attracts other objects. The closer objects are, the more strongly they attract each other. An enormous object, like the Earth, easily attracts objects that are close to it, like apples hanging from trees. Scientists haven't decided exactly what causes this attraction, but they believe it exists everywhere in the universe.
Second, air is a fluid that behaves essentially the same way liquids do. Like liquids, air is made of microscopic particles that move in relation to one another. Air also moves like water does -- in fact, some aerodynamic tests take place underwater instead of in the air. The particles in gasses, like the ones that make up air, are simply farther apart and move faster than the particles in liquids.
Third, sound is a vibration that travels through a medium, like a gas, a liquid or a solid object. A sound's source is an object that moves or changes shape very rapidly. For example, if you strike a bell, the bell vibrates in the air. As one side of the bell moves out, it pushes the air molecules next to it, increasing the pressure in that region of the air. This area of higher pressure is a compression. As the side of the bell moves back in, it pulls the molecules apart, creating a lower-pressure region called a rarefaction. The bell then repeats the process, creating a repeating series of compressions and rarefactions. Each repetition is one wavelength of the sound wave.
The sound wave travels as the moving molecules push and pull the molecules around them. Each molecule moves the one next to it in turn. Without this movement of molecules, the sound could not travel, which is why there is no sound in a vacuum.Acoustic levitation uses sound traveling through a fluid -- usually a gas -- to balance the force of gravity. On Earth, this can cause objects and materials to hover unsupported in the air. In space, it can hold objects steady so they don't move or drift. The process relies on of the properties of sound waves, especially intense sound waves.
The Physics of Sound Levitation A basic acoustic levitator has two main parts -- a transducer, which is a vibrating surface that makes sound, and a reflector. Often, the transducer and reflector have concave surfaces to help focus the sound. A sound wave travels away from the transducer and bounces off the reflector. Three basic properties of this traveling, reflecting wave help it to suspend objects in midair. First, the wave, like all sound, is a longitudinal pressure wave. In a longitudinal wave, movement of the points in the wave is parallel to the direction the wave travels. It's the kind of motion you'd see if you pushed and pulled one end of a stretched Slinky. Most illustrations, though, depict sound as a transverse wave, which is what you would see if you rapidly moved one end of the Slinky up and down. This is simply because transverse waves are easier to visualize than longitudinal waves.
Second, the wave can bounce off of surfaces. It follows the law of reflection, which states that the angle of incidence -- the angle at which something strikes a surface -- equals the angle of reflection -- the angle at which it leaves the surface. In other words, a sound wave bounces off a surface at the same angle at which it hits the surface. A sound wave that hits a surface head-on at a 90 degree angle will reflect straight back off at the same angle. The easiest way to understand wave reflection is to imagine a Slinky that is attached to a surface at one end. If you picked up the free end of the Slinky and moved it rapidly up and then down, a wave would travel the length of the spring. Once it reached the fixed end of the spring, it would reflect off of the surface and travel back toward you. The same thing happens if you push and pull one end of the spring, creating a longitudinal wave.
Finally, when a sound wave reflects off of a surface, the interaction between its compressions and rarefactions causes interference. Compressions that meet other compressions amplify one another, and compressions that meet rarefactions balance one another out. Sometimes, the reflection and interference can combine to create a standing wave. Standing waves appear to shift back and forth or vibrate in segments rather than travel from place to place. This illusion of stillness is what gives standing waves their name. Standing sound waves have defined nodes, or areas of minimum pressure, and antinodes, or areas of maximum pressure. A standing wave's nodes are at the heart of acoustic levitation. Imagine a river with rocks and rapids. The water is calm in some parts of the river, and it is turbulent in others. Floating debris and foam collect in calm portions of the river. In order for a floating object to stay still in a fast-moving part of the river, it would need to be anchored or propelled against the flow of the water. This is essentially what an acoustic levitator does, using sound moving through a gas in place of water.
Acoustic levitation uses sound pressure to allow objects
to float.
By placing a reflector the right distance away from a transducer, the acoustic levitator creates a standing wave. When the orientation of the wave is parallel to the pull of gravity, portions of the standing wave have a constant downward pressure and others have a constant upward pressure. The nodes have very little pressure.
In space, where there is little gravity, floating particles collect in the standing wave's nodes, which are calm and still. On Earth, objects collect just below the nodes, where the acoustic radiation pressure, or the amount of pressure that a sound wave can exert on a surface, balances the pull of gravity. Acoustic Videos Nonlinear Sound and Acoustic Levitation Ordinary standing waves can be relatively powerful. For example, a standing wave in an air duct can cause dust to collect in a pattern corresponding to the wave's nodes. A standing wave reverberating through a room can cause objects in its path to vibrate. Low-frequency standing waves can also cause people to feel nervous or disoriented -- in some cases, researchers find them in buildings people report to be haunted. But these feats are small potatoes compared to acoustic levitation. It takes far less effort to influence where dust settles or to shatter a glass than it takes to lift objects from the ground. Ordinary sound waves are limited by their linear nature. Increasing the amplitude of the wave causes the sound to be louder, but it doesn't affect the shape of the wave form or cause it to be much more physically powerful.
However, extremely intense sounds -- like sounds that are physically painful to human ears -- are usually nonlinear. They can cause disproportionately large responses in the substances they travel through. Some nonlinear affects include:
Other Uses for Nonlinear Sound Several medical procedures rely on nonlinear acoustics. For example, ultrasound imaging uses nonlinear effects to allow doctors to examine babies in the womb or view internal organs. High-intensity ultrasound waves can also pulverize kidney stones, cauterize internal injuries and destroy tumors. Levitating objects with sound isn't quite as simple as aiming a high-powered transducer at a reflector. Scientists also must use sounds of the correct frequency to create the desired standing wave. Any frequency can produce nonlinear effects at the right volume, but most systems use ultrasonic waves, which are too high-pitched for people to hear. In addition to the frequency and volume of the wave, researchers also must pay attention to a number of other factors:
Other Levitator Setups Although a levitator with one transducer and one reflector can suspend objects, some setups can increase stability or allow movement. For example, some levitators have three pairs of transducers and reflectors, which are positioned along the X, Y and Z axes. Others have one large transmitter and one small, movable reflector; the suspended object moves when the reflector moves.
Objects hover in a slightly different area within the sound field depending on the influence of gravity.
It takes more than just ordinary sound waves to supply this amount of pressure. Some methods can levitate objects without creating sound heard by the human ear such as the one demonstrated at Otsuka Lab,[2]acrylic glass tank to create a large acoustic field. Acoustic levitation is usually used for containerless processing electromagnetic levitation but has the advantage of being able to levitate nonconducting materials. There is no known theoretical limit to what acoustic levitation can lift given enough vibratory sound, but in practice current technology limits the amount that can be lifted by this force to at most a few kilograms.[3] Acoustic levitators are used mostly in industry and for researchers of anti-gravity effects such as NASA; however some are commercially available to the public.Some are silent while others produce some audible sound. There are many ways of creating this effect, from creating a wave underneath the object and reflecting it back to its source, to using an which has become more important of late due to the small size and resistance of microchips and other such things in industry. Containerless processing may also be used for applications requiring very-high-purity materials or chemical reactions too rigorous to happen in a container. This method is harder to control than other methods of containerless processing.
Different forms of levitation have different scientific applications. Electrostatic levitation is the process of using an electric field to levitate a charged object and counteract the effects of gravity. It was used, for instance, in Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment and is used to suspend the gyroscopes in Gravity Probe B during launch. Magnetic levitation, maglev, or magnetic suspension is a method by which an object is suspended with no support other than magnetic fields. Magnetic pressure is used to counteract the effects of the gravitational and any other accelerations. Optical levitation is a method developed by Arthur Ashkin whereby a material is levitated against the downward force of gravity by an upward force stemming from photon momentum transfer. Typically photon radiation pressure of a vertical upwardly directed and focused laser beam of enough intensity counters the downward force of gravity to allow for a stable optical trap capable of holding small particles in suspension. Aerodynamic levitation is the use of gas pressure to levitate materials so that they are no longer in physical contact with any container. In scientific experiments this removes contamination and nucleation issues associated with physical contact with a container.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), by William L. Shirer, is a general history of Nazi Germany (1933–45), based upon captured Third Reich documents, the available diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, General Franz Halder, and of the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, evidence and testimony from the Nuremberg Trials, British Foreign Office reports, and the author’s recollections of six years’ of Third Reich reportage, for newspapers, the United Press International (UPI), and CBS radio, ended by Nazi censorship in 1940.[1] In 1961, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich earned a National Book Award, and was adapted to television as a miniseries and broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network in 1966.Whereas nearly all American journalists praised the book, academics were split. Some of these acknowledged Shirer's achievement, but most condemned it.[12] The harshest criticism tended to come from those who disagreed with the Sonderweg or "Luther to Hitler" thesis mentioned above. Klaus Epstein listed "four major failings": a crude understanding of German history; a lack of balance, leaving important gaps; no understanding of a modern totalitarian regime; and ignorance of current scholarship of the Nazi period.[9] Elizabeth Wiskemann stated in a 1961 review that the book was "not sufficiently scholarly nor sufficiently well written to satisfy more academic demands ... It is too long and cumbersome... Mr Shirer, has, however compiled a manual ... which will certainly prove useful."[16]
The National Security Agency can be traced to the May 20, 1949, originally the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA).[9] This organization was originally established within the U.S. Department of Defense under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The AFSA was to direct the communications and electronic intelligence activities of the U.S. military intelligence units: the Army Security Agency, the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service. However, that agency had little power and lacked a centralized coordination mechanism. The creation of NSA resulted from a December 10, 1951, memo sent by CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith to James S. Lay, Executive Secretary of the National Security Council.[10] The memo observed that "control over, and coordination of, the collection and processing of Communications Intelligence had proved ineffective" and recommended a survey of communications intelligence activities. The proposal was approved on December 13, 1951, and the study authorized on December 28, 1951. The report was completed by June 13, 1952. Generally known as the "Brownell Committee Report," after committee chairman Herbert Brownell, it surveyed the history of U.S. communications intelligence activities and suggested the need for a much greater degree of coordination and direction at the national level. As the change in the security agency's name indicated, the role of NSA was extended beyond the armed forces.
The creation of NSA was authorized in a letter written by President Harry S. Truman in June 1952. The agency was formally established through a revision of National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 9 on October 24, 1952,[10] and officially came into existence on November 4, 1952. President Truman's letter was itself classified and remained unknown to the public for more than a generation[vague].
Riverbank produced book on Bacon cipher
http://books.google.com/books?id=dPwsAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=riverbank+laboratories&source=bl&ots=0DnT5fZGfh&sig=C1QFk4f3hJ5_-Qw7ADgRQSnxsQE&hl=en&ei=NQu4TLGQGJG-sAP1zYGWDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q&f=false
The idea that something so intangible can lift objects can seem unbelievable, but it's a real phenomenon. Acoustic levitation takes advantage of the properties of sound to cause solids, liquids and heavy gases to float. The process can take place in normal or reduced gravity. In other words, sound can levitate objects on Earth or in gas-filled enclosures in space. Scientists have developed a sound generator so powerful its shock waves can stun, and even kill people. Another group of researchers have developed another unusual application for sound: a method of "acoustic levitation" that could help maintain colonies on Mars or the moon by using high-pitched sound waves to remove alien dust.
Wired explains,Blasting a high-pitched noise from a tweeter into a pipe that focuses the sound waves can create enough pressure to lift troublesome alien dust off surfaces, according to a study published January in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Extra-terrestrial missions have been plagued by dust and debris, which cling to rovers and astronauts because lunar and Martian environments lack the Earth's water or atmosphere that can displace the particles.
According to Wired, Electrostatic charging from solar winds and UV radiation on the Moon makes this sharp dust cling to everything, including astronaut suits where it can work its way through the glove air locks. It also sticks to the solar panels that power rovers and other instruments.
See acoustic levitation for yourself in the video below! Using only sound waves, the scientists are able to lift mock "Martian and lunar dust" off of a solar panel. Cool!
WATCH: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/acoustic-levitation-stere_n_429558.html
To understand how acoustic levitation works, you first need to know a little about gravity, air and sound. First, gravity is a force that causes objects to attract one another. The simplest way to understand gravity is through Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation. This law states that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle. The more massive an object is, the more strongly it attracts other objects. The closer objects are, the more strongly they attract each other. An enormous object, like the Earth, easily attracts objects that are close to it, like apples hanging from trees. Scientists haven't decided exactly what causes this attraction, but they believe it exists everywhere in the universe.
Second, air is a fluid that behaves essentially the same way liquids do. Like liquids, air is made of microscopic particles that move in relation to one another. Air also moves like water does -- in fact, some aerodynamic tests take place underwater instead of in the air. The particles in gasses, like the ones that make up air, are simply farther apart and move faster than the particles in liquids.
Third, sound is a vibration that travels through a medium, like a gas, a liquid or a solid object. A sound's source is an object that moves or changes shape very rapidly. For example, if you strike a bell, the bell vibrates in the air. As one side of the bell moves out, it pushes the air molecules next to it, increasing the pressure in that region of the air. This area of higher pressure is a compression. As the side of the bell moves back in, it pulls the molecules apart, creating a lower-pressure region called a rarefaction. The bell then repeats the process, creating a repeating series of compressions and rarefactions. Each repetition is one wavelength of the sound wave.
The sound wave travels as the moving molecules push and pull the molecules around them. Each molecule moves the one next to it in turn. Without this movement of molecules, the sound could not travel, which is why there is no sound in a vacuum.Acoustic levitation uses sound traveling through a fluid -- usually a gas -- to balance the force of gravity. On Earth, this can cause objects and materials to hover unsupported in the air. In space, it can hold objects steady so they don't move or drift. The process relies on of the properties of sound waves, especially intense sound waves.
The Physics of Sound Levitation A basic acoustic levitator has two main parts -- a transducer, which is a vibrating surface that makes sound, and a reflector. Often, the transducer and reflector have concave surfaces to help focus the sound. A sound wave travels away from the transducer and bounces off the reflector. Three basic properties of this traveling, reflecting wave help it to suspend objects in midair. First, the wave, like all sound, is a longitudinal pressure wave. In a longitudinal wave, movement of the points in the wave is parallel to the direction the wave travels. It's the kind of motion you'd see if you pushed and pulled one end of a stretched Slinky. Most illustrations, though, depict sound as a transverse wave, which is what you would see if you rapidly moved one end of the Slinky up and down. This is simply because transverse waves are easier to visualize than longitudinal waves.
Second, the wave can bounce off of surfaces. It follows the law of reflection, which states that the angle of incidence -- the angle at which something strikes a surface -- equals the angle of reflection -- the angle at which it leaves the surface. In other words, a sound wave bounces off a surface at the same angle at which it hits the surface. A sound wave that hits a surface head-on at a 90 degree angle will reflect straight back off at the same angle. The easiest way to understand wave reflection is to imagine a Slinky that is attached to a surface at one end. If you picked up the free end of the Slinky and moved it rapidly up and then down, a wave would travel the length of the spring. Once it reached the fixed end of the spring, it would reflect off of the surface and travel back toward you. The same thing happens if you push and pull one end of the spring, creating a longitudinal wave.
Finally, when a sound wave reflects off of a surface, the interaction between its compressions and rarefactions causes interference. Compressions that meet other compressions amplify one another, and compressions that meet rarefactions balance one another out. Sometimes, the reflection and interference can combine to create a standing wave. Standing waves appear to shift back and forth or vibrate in segments rather than travel from place to place. This illusion of stillness is what gives standing waves their name. Standing sound waves have defined nodes, or areas of minimum pressure, and antinodes, or areas of maximum pressure. A standing wave's nodes are at the heart of acoustic levitation. Imagine a river with rocks and rapids. The water is calm in some parts of the river, and it is turbulent in others. Floating debris and foam collect in calm portions of the river. In order for a floating object to stay still in a fast-moving part of the river, it would need to be anchored or propelled against the flow of the water. This is essentially what an acoustic levitator does, using sound moving through a gas in place of water.
Acoustic levitation uses sound pressure to allow objects
to float.
By placing a reflector the right distance away from a transducer, the acoustic levitator creates a standing wave. When the orientation of the wave is parallel to the pull of gravity, portions of the standing wave have a constant downward pressure and others have a constant upward pressure. The nodes have very little pressure.
In space, where there is little gravity, floating particles collect in the standing wave's nodes, which are calm and still. On Earth, objects collect just below the nodes, where the acoustic radiation pressure, or the amount of pressure that a sound wave can exert on a surface, balances the pull of gravity. Acoustic Videos Nonlinear Sound and Acoustic Levitation Ordinary standing waves can be relatively powerful. For example, a standing wave in an air duct can cause dust to collect in a pattern corresponding to the wave's nodes. A standing wave reverberating through a room can cause objects in its path to vibrate. Low-frequency standing waves can also cause people to feel nervous or disoriented -- in some cases, researchers find them in buildings people report to be haunted. But these feats are small potatoes compared to acoustic levitation. It takes far less effort to influence where dust settles or to shatter a glass than it takes to lift objects from the ground. Ordinary sound waves are limited by their linear nature. Increasing the amplitude of the wave causes the sound to be louder, but it doesn't affect the shape of the wave form or cause it to be much more physically powerful.
However, extremely intense sounds -- like sounds that are physically painful to human ears -- are usually nonlinear. They can cause disproportionately large responses in the substances they travel through. Some nonlinear affects include:
- Distorted wave forms
- Shock waves, like sonic booms
- Acoustic streaming, or the constant flow of the fluid the wave travels through
- Acoustic saturation, or the point at which the matter can no longer absorb any more energy from the sound wave
Other Uses for Nonlinear Sound Several medical procedures rely on nonlinear acoustics. For example, ultrasound imaging uses nonlinear effects to allow doctors to examine babies in the womb or view internal organs. High-intensity ultrasound waves can also pulverize kidney stones, cauterize internal injuries and destroy tumors. Levitating objects with sound isn't quite as simple as aiming a high-powered transducer at a reflector. Scientists also must use sounds of the correct frequency to create the desired standing wave. Any frequency can produce nonlinear effects at the right volume, but most systems use ultrasonic waves, which are too high-pitched for people to hear. In addition to the frequency and volume of the wave, researchers also must pay attention to a number of other factors:
- The distance between the transducer and the reflector must be a multiple of half of the wavelength of the sound the transducer produces. This produces a wave with stable nodes and antinodes. Some waves can produce several usable nodes, but the ones nearest the transducer and reflector usually not suitable for levitating objects. This is because the waves create a pressure zone close to the reflective surfaces.
- In a microgravity environment, such as outer space, the stable areas within the nodes must be large enough to support the floating object. On Earth, the high-pressure areas just below the node must be large enough as well. For this reason, the object being levitated should measure between one third and half of the wavelength of the sound. Objects larger than two thirds of the sound's wavelength are too large to be levitated -- the field isn't big enough to support them. The higher the frequency of the sound, the smaller the diameter of the objects it's possible to levitate.
- Objects that are the right size to levitate must also be of the right mass. In other words, scientists must evaluate the density of the object and determine whether the sound wave can produce enough pressure to counteract the pull of gravity on it.
- Drops of liquid being levitated must have a suitable Bond number, which is a ratio that describes the liquid's surface tension, density and size in the context of gravity and the surrounding fluid. If the Bond number is too low, the drop will burst.
- The intensity of the sound must not overwhelm the surface tension of liquid droplets being levitated. If the sound field is too intense, the drop will flatten into a donut and then burst.
- Manufacturing very small electronic devices and microchips often involves robots or complex machinery. Acoustic levitators can perform the same task by manipulating sound. For example, levitated molten materials will gradually cool and harden, and in a properly tuned field of sound, the resulting solid object is a perfect sphere. Similarly, a correctly shaped field can force plastics to deposit and harden only on the correct areas of a microchip.
- Some materials are corrosive or otherwise react with ordinary containers used during chemical analysis. Researchers can suspend these materials in an acoustic field to study them without the risk of contamination from or destruction of containers.
- The study of foam physics has a big obstacle -- gravity. Gravity pulls the liquid downward from foam, drying and destroying it. Researchers can contain foam with in acoustic fields to study it in space, without the interference of gravity. This can lead to a better understanding of how foam performs tasks like cleaning ocean water.
Other Levitator Setups Although a levitator with one transducer and one reflector can suspend objects, some setups can increase stability or allow movement. For example, some levitators have three pairs of transducers and reflectors, which are positioned along the X, Y and Z axes. Others have one large transmitter and one small, movable reflector; the suspended object moves when the reflector moves.
Objects hover in a slightly different area within the sound field depending on the influence of gravity.
It takes more than just ordinary sound waves to supply this amount of pressure. Some methods can levitate objects without creating sound heard by the human ear such as the one demonstrated at Otsuka Lab,[2]acrylic glass tank to create a large acoustic field. Acoustic levitation is usually used for containerless processing electromagnetic levitation but has the advantage of being able to levitate nonconducting materials. There is no known theoretical limit to what acoustic levitation can lift given enough vibratory sound, but in practice current technology limits the amount that can be lifted by this force to at most a few kilograms.[3] Acoustic levitators are used mostly in industry and for researchers of anti-gravity effects such as NASA; however some are commercially available to the public.Some are silent while others produce some audible sound. There are many ways of creating this effect, from creating a wave underneath the object and reflecting it back to its source, to using an which has become more important of late due to the small size and resistance of microchips and other such things in industry. Containerless processing may also be used for applications requiring very-high-purity materials or chemical reactions too rigorous to happen in a container. This method is harder to control than other methods of containerless processing.
Different forms of levitation have different scientific applications. Electrostatic levitation is the process of using an electric field to levitate a charged object and counteract the effects of gravity. It was used, for instance, in Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment and is used to suspend the gyroscopes in Gravity Probe B during launch. Magnetic levitation, maglev, or magnetic suspension is a method by which an object is suspended with no support other than magnetic fields. Magnetic pressure is used to counteract the effects of the gravitational and any other accelerations. Optical levitation is a method developed by Arthur Ashkin whereby a material is levitated against the downward force of gravity by an upward force stemming from photon momentum transfer. Typically photon radiation pressure of a vertical upwardly directed and focused laser beam of enough intensity counters the downward force of gravity to allow for a stable optical trap capable of holding small particles in suspension. Aerodynamic levitation is the use of gas pressure to levitate materials so that they are no longer in physical contact with any container. In scientific experiments this removes contamination and nucleation issues associated with physical contact with a container.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), by William L. Shirer, is a general history of Nazi Germany (1933–45), based upon captured Third Reich documents, the available diaries of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, General Franz Halder, and of the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, evidence and testimony from the Nuremberg Trials, British Foreign Office reports, and the author’s recollections of six years’ of Third Reich reportage, for newspapers, the United Press International (UPI), and CBS radio, ended by Nazi censorship in 1940.[1] In 1961, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich earned a National Book Award, and was adapted to television as a miniseries and broadcast by the American Broadcasting Company network in 1966.Whereas nearly all American journalists praised the book, academics were split. Some of these acknowledged Shirer's achievement, but most condemned it.[12] The harshest criticism tended to come from those who disagreed with the Sonderweg or "Luther to Hitler" thesis mentioned above. Klaus Epstein listed "four major failings": a crude understanding of German history; a lack of balance, leaving important gaps; no understanding of a modern totalitarian regime; and ignorance of current scholarship of the Nazi period.[9] Elizabeth Wiskemann stated in a 1961 review that the book was "not sufficiently scholarly nor sufficiently well written to satisfy more academic demands ... It is too long and cumbersome... Mr Shirer, has, however compiled a manual ... which will certainly prove useful."[16]
The National Security Agency can be traced to the May 20, 1949, originally the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA).[9] This organization was originally established within the U.S. Department of Defense under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The AFSA was to direct the communications and electronic intelligence activities of the U.S. military intelligence units: the Army Security Agency, the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service. However, that agency had little power and lacked a centralized coordination mechanism. The creation of NSA resulted from a December 10, 1951, memo sent by CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith to James S. Lay, Executive Secretary of the National Security Council.[10] The memo observed that "control over, and coordination of, the collection and processing of Communications Intelligence had proved ineffective" and recommended a survey of communications intelligence activities. The proposal was approved on December 13, 1951, and the study authorized on December 28, 1951. The report was completed by June 13, 1952. Generally known as the "Brownell Committee Report," after committee chairman Herbert Brownell, it surveyed the history of U.S. communications intelligence activities and suggested the need for a much greater degree of coordination and direction at the national level. As the change in the security agency's name indicated, the role of NSA was extended beyond the armed forces.
The creation of NSA was authorized in a letter written by President Harry S. Truman in June 1952. The agency was formally established through a revision of National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 9 on October 24, 1952,[10] and officially came into existence on November 4, 1952. President Truman's letter was itself classified and remained unknown to the public for more than a generation[vague].
Riverbank produced book on Bacon cipher
http://books.google.com/books?id=dPwsAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=riverbank+laboratories&source=bl&ots=0DnT5fZGfh&sig=C1QFk4f3hJ5_-Qw7ADgRQSnxsQE&hl=en&ei=NQu4TLGQGJG-sAP1zYGWDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q&f=false
TOP CODEBREAKERS
William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 – November 12, 1969) was a US Armycryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s. In the late 1930s, subordinates of his led by Frank Rowlett broke Japan's PURPLE cipher, thus disclosing Japanese diplomatic secrets beginning before World War II era.
Another of Fabyan's pet projects was research into secret messages which Sir Francis Bacon had allegedly hidden in various texts during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The research was carried out by Elizabeth Wells Gallup. She believed that she had discovered many such messages in the works of William Shakespeare, and convinced herself that Bacon had written many, if not all, of Shakespeare's works. Friedman had become something of an expert photographer while working on his other projects, and was asked to travel to England on several occasions to help Gallup photograph historical manuscripts during her research. He became fascinated with the work as he courted Elizebeth Smith, Mrs. Gallup's assistant and an accomplished cryptographer. They married, and he soon became director of Riverbank's Department of Codes and Ciphers as well as its Department of Genetics. During this time, Friedman wrote a series of 23 papers on cryptography, collectively known as the "Riverbank publications", included the first description of the index of coincidence, an important mathematical tool in cryptanalysis.
With the entry of the United States into World War I, Fabyan offered the services of his Department of Codes and Ciphers to the government. No Federal department existed for this kind of work (although both the Army and Navy had had embryonic departments at various times), and soon Riverbank became the unofficial cryptographic center for the US Government. During this period, the Friedmans broke a code used by German-funded Hindu radicals in the US who planned to ship arms to India to gain independence from Britain. Analysing the format of the messages, Riverbank realized that the code was based on a dictionary of some sort, a cryptographic technique common at the time. The Friedmans soon managed to decrypt most of the messages, but only long after the case had come to trial did the book itself come to light: a German-English dictionary published in 1880.
Friedman turned out to be the true find. He fell in love with cryptographer Elizebeth Smith, and taught himself her specialty in a matter of weeks. He soon proved capable of cracking Britain's most sophisticated field code at a speed that was previously believed impossible. But as Friedeman improved the code-breaking, Gallup's anticipated breakthrough on the authorship question failed to occur. The cryptanalysis simply didn't find anything useful and Friedman began to suspect that no cipher existed. After retirement, he and his wife returned to the Baconian ciphers. They proved false the Baconian theory in an incisive report that won them the Folger Shakespeare Library literary prize in 1955. This work was published in 1957 as "The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined."
The cryptology project might have dissolved had the United States not entered World War I in April 1917. The federal government had virtually no cryptographers, and Fabyan had plenty, so Riverbank became the NSA of its day. Newlyweds William and Elizebeth Friedman were soon cracking German and Mexican codes for the U.S. military and helping Scotland Yard expose anti-British agents in North America. When the U.S. Army finally established its own Cipher Bureau, its first 88 officers were trained by Fabyan and the Friedmans at Riverbank. When they graduated, William Friedman took a commission himself and went to France. William Friedman became the nation's top code breaker and led the successful effort to crack the Japanese codes before World War II. Elizebeth Friedman did her code breaking for the Coast Guard and the Treasury Department, and later established a secure communications system for the International Monetary Fund.
William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 - November 12, 1969) served as a US Army cryptologist, running the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service through the 1930s and its follow-on services right into the 1950s. He supervised the breaking of the Japanese Purple code in the late 1930s. Frank Rowlett led the SIS team which cracked the cypher machine. The output provided considerable information about Japanese diplomacy at the highest level througout World War II and afterwards, until Congressional hearings made public the fact that the US had been reading messages processed by that crypto system. Many consider Friedman one of the greatest cryptologists of all time, and his application of statistical methods to code-breaking one of the most significant advances in the field. He also coined much of the language used in decryption, introducing terms such as cryptography and cryptanalysis.
Friedman was born in Russia, the son of a postal worker who migrated to Pittsburgh in 1892. He studied at the Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing and received a scholarship to work on genetics at Cornell University . Meanwhile George Fabyan, who ran a private research laboratory to study any project that caught his fancy, decided to set up his own genetics project and was referred to Friedman. Friedman joined Fabyan's Riverbank Laboratories outside Chicago in September 1915. As head of the Department of Genetics, one of the projects he ran studied the effects of moonlight on crop growth, and so he experimented with the planting of wheat during various phases of the moon.
Another of Fabyan's pet projects funded Elizabeth Wells Gallup's research into the coded messages which Sir Francis Bacon had allegedly hidden in various texts during the reign of Elizabeth I and King James. Believing that she had detected that many of Shakespeare's works also included such hidden messages, Gallup became convinced that Bacon wrote many, if not all, of William Shakespeare's works. Friedman had become something of an expert photographer while working on his other projects, and was asked to travel to England on several occasions to help Gallup photograph historical manuscripts during her research. At this point he became fascinated with cryptology, while he courted Elizebeth Smith, Mrs. Gallup's assistant and an accomplished cryptologist. They married, and soon after he became the director of the Department of Codes and Ciphers as well as of the Department of Genetics at Riverbank.
With the US's entry into World War I, Fabyan offered the services of his Department of Codes and Ciphers to the government. No Federal department existed for this kind of work (although both the Army and the Navy had had embryonic departments at various times), and soon Riverbank became the unofficial cryptographic center for the Federal GovernmentUS. During this period the Friedmans cracked a code used by German-funded Hindu radicals in the US who planned to ship arms to India to gain independence from Britain. Analysing the format of the messages, Riverbank realized that the code was based on a dictionary of some sort, a common encryption technique. The Friedmans soon managed to decode most messages, but only long after the case had come to trial did the book itself come to light: a German-English dictionary published in 1880.
The United States government decided to set up its own code-breaking service, and sent Army officers to Riverbank for training under Friedman. To support their training, Friedman produced a series of technical monographs, completing seven by early 1918. He then enlisted in the Army, and travelled to France to serve as the personal code-breaker for General John Pershing. He returned to the US in 1920 and published an eighth monograph, "The Index of Coincidence and its Applications in Cryptography", which is considered to be the most important single publication in modern cryptology to that time.
In 1921 he joined the government's American Black Chamber where he was placed in charge of researching new codes and ways to break them, and in 1922 he was promoted to head the Research and Development Division. After the dissolution of the Black Chamber in 1929, Friedman moved to the Army's Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in a similar capacity.
During the 1920s a series of new cyphers processed by machines gained popularity, based largely on typewriter mechanicals attached to basic electrical circuitry - batteries, switches and lights. The first of such machines had been the Hebern Rotor Machine, designed in the US in 1915 by Edward Hebern. This system offered such security and simplicity of use that Hebern heavily promoted his company to investors, feeling that all companies would soon be using them and his company would clearly be successful. But the company went bankrupt when the war ended, and Hebern eventually landed in prison, convicted of stock manipulation.
Friedman realized that the new rotor machines would be important, and devoted some time to cracking Hebern's design. Over a period of years he discovered a number of problems common to most of the rotor machine designs. Examples of some dangerous features included having the rotors turn once with every keypress, and making the fast rotor (the one that turns with every keypress) at either end of the rotor stack. In this case the output generated by the machines will have strings of 26 letters that form a simple substitution cipher, and by collecting enough cyphertext and applying a standard statistical method known as the kappa test, he showed that he could, albeit with great difficulty, crack any code generated by such a machine.
Friedman then used his understanding of the rotor machines to develop several of his own that remained immune to his own attacks. He eventually developed nine designs, six of which remain still secret today. Some of his inventions while developing these systems only gained patents decades later, since the Defense Department regarded them as so critical that granting a patent would harm national security. The culmination of various earlier designs resulted in the SIGABA, which became the US's highest security encryption system during World War II. It was similar to the British Typex machine, and adapters were apparetnly built which could allow the two machines to interoperate. Neither was, as far as is publicly known, broken during WWII. In fact, SIGABA would still be quite good tady, in the computer era. computers.
In 1939 the Japanese introduced a new cypher machine system for their most secure diplomatic traffic to and from important embassies, replacing an earlier system SIS referred to as Red. The new cypher, referred to as Purple, proved quite difficult to crack. The Navy's OP-20-G and the SIS thought it might relate to the earlier mechanical cypher machines, and the SIS set about attacking it. After spending several months studying the cyphertexts and trying to discover the underlying patterns. Eventually, in an extraordianry achievement, the SIS team figured it out. Like the some of the prior Japanese designs, Purple didn't use 'rotors' unlike the German Enigma or the Hebern design, but used stepper switches like those used in automated telephone exchanges. Leo Rosen of the SIS built a machine and, astonishingly, used the same telephone stepper switch that the Japanese designer had used.
By the end of 1940 Friedman's team at the SIS had constructed an exact duplicate of the Purple machine, even though they had never seen one. With an understanding of Purple and duplicate machines of their own to use, the SIS could then decrypt an increasing amount of the Japanese traffic. One such intercept was the message to the Japanese Embassy in Washington ordering an end (on December 7th 1941) to the negotiations with the US. The message gave a clear indication of impending war, and was to have been delivered to the US State Department only hours prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The pressure of his responsibilites, including the Purple effort was too much and Friedman entered a hospital in 1941 with a nervous breakdown. After his release, he served as Director of Communications Research for the SIS for the rest of the war. Friedman visited the British code-breaking operations at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in 1941. He exchanged information on the techniques for attacking Purple for the British information on how they had broken the Enigma.
Following the WWII, Friedman remained in government signals intelligence. In 1949 he became head of the code division of the newly-formed Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), and in 1952 become the chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) when it formed to take over from the AFSA.
Friedman retired in 1956 and turned his attention, with his wife, to the problem that had originally brought them together: examining Bacon's codes. In 1957 they wrote The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, in which they demonstrated unfortunate flaws in Gallup's work. His health began to fail in the late 1960s, and he died in 1969.
Elizebeth Friedman was also heavily involved in cryptography throughout much of the inter-War period, although typically on the civilian side. During the 1920s she gained some fame for repeatedly breaking the cyphers and codes being used by "rum runners" bringing alcohol into the US during Prohibition, and in 1927 the US Coast Guard hired her to help them with their policing operations. By 1930 she had cracked over 12,000 messages for the Coast Guard, the Bureau of Customs, the Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Prohibition, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the Department of Justice.
In 1934 she became involved in a particularly odd case, in which a Canadian-registered ship, the I'm Alone, sank after being chased into international waters off the US. She decoded several messages that demonstrated that a US citizen had actually paid for the ship, which therefore had ostensibe US-ownership. The result expanded the law regarding police chases, allowing a ship involved in illegal activity to be followed into international waters, and thereby extracting the US from an embarrassing political scandal.
During World War II Elizebeth Friedman moved to the OSS and became one of their chief cryptologists. She became involved in a particularly famous case in which a husband-and-wife team were sending coded messages to the Japanese, written on dolls that the wife sold through a thriving mail-order business. Velvalee Dickinson became known as "The Doll Woman" when the case was broken to the press. Elizebeth retired after her husband's death in 1969 and lived on until 1980.
* http://www.nsa.gov/honor/w_friedman.html
* http://www.sans.org/rr/history/friedman.php
In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson withdrew the Bureau's funds, on the ground that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Yardley, jobless in the Depression, awoke America to the importance of cryptology in his best-selling The American Black Chamber (1931). His bureau's work was assumed by the army's tiny Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) under the brilliant cryptologist William F. Friedman. During World War I, Friedman, at the Riverbank Laboratories, a think tank near Chicago, had broken new paths for cryptanalysis; soon after he joined the War Department as a civilian employee in 1921, he reconstructed the locations and starting positions of the rotors in a cipher machine. His work placed the United States at the forefront of world cryptology.
Beginning in 1931, he expanded the SIS, hiring mathematicians first. By 1940, a team under the cryptanalyst Frank B. Rowlett had reconstructed the chief Japanese diplomatic cipher machine, which the Americans called purple. These solutions could not prevent Pearl Harbor because no messages saying anything like "We will attack Pearl Harbor" were ever transmitted; the Japanese diplomats themselves were not told of the attack. Later in the war, however, the solutions of the radiograms of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, enciphered in purple, provided the Allies with what Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall called "our main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe." One revealed details of Hitler's Atlantic Wall defenses.
The U.S. Navy's OP-20-G, established in 1924 under Lieutenant Laurence F. Safford, solved Japanese naval codes. This work flowered when the solutions of its branch in Hawaii made possible the American victory at Midway in 1942, the midair shootdown of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943, and the sinking of Japanese freighters throughout the Pacific war, strangling Japan. Its headquarters in Washington cooperated with the British code breaking agency, the Government Code and Cypher School, at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, to solve U-boat messages encrypted in the Enigma rotor cipher machine. This enabled Allied convoys to dodge wolf packs and so help win the Battle of the Atlantic. Teams of American cryptanalysts and tabulating machine engineers went to the British agency to cooperate in solving German Enigma and other cipher systems, shortening the land war in Europe. No other source of information— not spies, aerial photographs, or prisoner interrogations—provided such trustworthy, high-level, voluminous, detailed, and prompt intelligence as code breaking.
Wallace Clement Sabine (1868-1919)
Sabine's Reverberation Formula
Wallace Clement Sabine was a pioneer in architectural acoustics. A century ago he started experiments in the Fogg lecture room at Harvard, to investigate the impact of absorption on the reverberation time. It was on the 29th of October 1898 that he discovered the type of relation between these quantities. Sabine derived an expression for the duration T of the residual sound to decay below the audible intensity, starting from a 1,000,000 times higher initial intensity:
T = 0.161 V/A
where V is the room volume in cubic meters, and A is the total absorption in square meters. Sabine's reverberation formula has been applied successfully for many years to determine material absorption coefficients by means of reverberation rooms. Keeping in mind some conditions with regard to the sound field diffusion and the value of A, Sabine's formula is still widely accepted as a very useful estimation method for the reverberation time in rooms.
Sabin as Unit of Sound Absorption
The unit of sound absorption is square meter, referring to the area of open window. This unit stems from the fact that sound energy travelling toward an open window in a room will not be reflected at all, but completely disappear in the open air outside. The effect would be the same if the open window would be replaced with 100 % absorbing material of the same dimensions.
Therefore, 1 square meter of 100 % absorbing material has an absorption of 1 square meter of open window. In honor of W.C. Sabine, the unit of absorption is also named sabin or metric sabin. However, these units are used not very often. One sabin is the absorption of one square foot of open window, and one metric sabin is the absorption of one square meter of open window.
Symphony Hall
The first auditorium that was designed by Sabine, applying his new insight in acoustics, was the new Boston Music Hall, currently known as the Symphony Hall. It was formally opened on October 15, 1900. Nowadays, it is still considered one of the three finest concert halls in the world.
Also visit the famous Riverbank Laboratories.
References
Wallace C. Sabine: Collected Papers on Acoustics. 1993, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-932146-60-0 Peninsula Publishing, Los Altos, U. S.. LCCN: 93-085708
Another of Fabyan's pet projects was research into secret messages which Sir Francis Bacon had allegedly hidden in various texts during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. The research was carried out by Elizabeth Wells Gallup. She believed that she had discovered many such messages in the works of William Shakespeare, and convinced herself that Bacon had written many, if not all, of Shakespeare's works. Friedman had become something of an expert photographer while working on his other projects, and was asked to travel to England on several occasions to help Gallup photograph historical manuscripts during her research. He became fascinated with the work as he courted Elizebeth Smith, Mrs. Gallup's assistant and an accomplished cryptographer. They married, and he soon became director of Riverbank's Department of Codes and Ciphers as well as its Department of Genetics. During this time, Friedman wrote a series of 23 papers on cryptography, collectively known as the "Riverbank publications", included the first description of the index of coincidence, an important mathematical tool in cryptanalysis.
With the entry of the United States into World War I, Fabyan offered the services of his Department of Codes and Ciphers to the government. No Federal department existed for this kind of work (although both the Army and Navy had had embryonic departments at various times), and soon Riverbank became the unofficial cryptographic center for the US Government. During this period, the Friedmans broke a code used by German-funded Hindu radicals in the US who planned to ship arms to India to gain independence from Britain. Analysing the format of the messages, Riverbank realized that the code was based on a dictionary of some sort, a cryptographic technique common at the time. The Friedmans soon managed to decrypt most of the messages, but only long after the case had come to trial did the book itself come to light: a German-English dictionary published in 1880.
Friedman turned out to be the true find. He fell in love with cryptographer Elizebeth Smith, and taught himself her specialty in a matter of weeks. He soon proved capable of cracking Britain's most sophisticated field code at a speed that was previously believed impossible. But as Friedeman improved the code-breaking, Gallup's anticipated breakthrough on the authorship question failed to occur. The cryptanalysis simply didn't find anything useful and Friedman began to suspect that no cipher existed. After retirement, he and his wife returned to the Baconian ciphers. They proved false the Baconian theory in an incisive report that won them the Folger Shakespeare Library literary prize in 1955. This work was published in 1957 as "The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined."
The cryptology project might have dissolved had the United States not entered World War I in April 1917. The federal government had virtually no cryptographers, and Fabyan had plenty, so Riverbank became the NSA of its day. Newlyweds William and Elizebeth Friedman were soon cracking German and Mexican codes for the U.S. military and helping Scotland Yard expose anti-British agents in North America. When the U.S. Army finally established its own Cipher Bureau, its first 88 officers were trained by Fabyan and the Friedmans at Riverbank. When they graduated, William Friedman took a commission himself and went to France. William Friedman became the nation's top code breaker and led the successful effort to crack the Japanese codes before World War II. Elizebeth Friedman did her code breaking for the Coast Guard and the Treasury Department, and later established a secure communications system for the International Monetary Fund.
William Frederick Friedman (September 24, 1891 - November 12, 1969) served as a US Army cryptologist, running the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service through the 1930s and its follow-on services right into the 1950s. He supervised the breaking of the Japanese Purple code in the late 1930s. Frank Rowlett led the SIS team which cracked the cypher machine. The output provided considerable information about Japanese diplomacy at the highest level througout World War II and afterwards, until Congressional hearings made public the fact that the US had been reading messages processed by that crypto system. Many consider Friedman one of the greatest cryptologists of all time, and his application of statistical methods to code-breaking one of the most significant advances in the field. He also coined much of the language used in decryption, introducing terms such as cryptography and cryptanalysis.
Friedman was born in Russia, the son of a postal worker who migrated to Pittsburgh in 1892. He studied at the Michigan Agricultural College in East Lansing and received a scholarship to work on genetics at Cornell University . Meanwhile George Fabyan, who ran a private research laboratory to study any project that caught his fancy, decided to set up his own genetics project and was referred to Friedman. Friedman joined Fabyan's Riverbank Laboratories outside Chicago in September 1915. As head of the Department of Genetics, one of the projects he ran studied the effects of moonlight on crop growth, and so he experimented with the planting of wheat during various phases of the moon.
Another of Fabyan's pet projects funded Elizabeth Wells Gallup's research into the coded messages which Sir Francis Bacon had allegedly hidden in various texts during the reign of Elizabeth I and King James. Believing that she had detected that many of Shakespeare's works also included such hidden messages, Gallup became convinced that Bacon wrote many, if not all, of William Shakespeare's works. Friedman had become something of an expert photographer while working on his other projects, and was asked to travel to England on several occasions to help Gallup photograph historical manuscripts during her research. At this point he became fascinated with cryptology, while he courted Elizebeth Smith, Mrs. Gallup's assistant and an accomplished cryptologist. They married, and soon after he became the director of the Department of Codes and Ciphers as well as of the Department of Genetics at Riverbank.
With the US's entry into World War I, Fabyan offered the services of his Department of Codes and Ciphers to the government. No Federal department existed for this kind of work (although both the Army and the Navy had had embryonic departments at various times), and soon Riverbank became the unofficial cryptographic center for the Federal GovernmentUS. During this period the Friedmans cracked a code used by German-funded Hindu radicals in the US who planned to ship arms to India to gain independence from Britain. Analysing the format of the messages, Riverbank realized that the code was based on a dictionary of some sort, a common encryption technique. The Friedmans soon managed to decode most messages, but only long after the case had come to trial did the book itself come to light: a German-English dictionary published in 1880.
The United States government decided to set up its own code-breaking service, and sent Army officers to Riverbank for training under Friedman. To support their training, Friedman produced a series of technical monographs, completing seven by early 1918. He then enlisted in the Army, and travelled to France to serve as the personal code-breaker for General John Pershing. He returned to the US in 1920 and published an eighth monograph, "The Index of Coincidence and its Applications in Cryptography", which is considered to be the most important single publication in modern cryptology to that time.
In 1921 he joined the government's American Black Chamber where he was placed in charge of researching new codes and ways to break them, and in 1922 he was promoted to head the Research and Development Division. After the dissolution of the Black Chamber in 1929, Friedman moved to the Army's Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) in a similar capacity.
During the 1920s a series of new cyphers processed by machines gained popularity, based largely on typewriter mechanicals attached to basic electrical circuitry - batteries, switches and lights. The first of such machines had been the Hebern Rotor Machine, designed in the US in 1915 by Edward Hebern. This system offered such security and simplicity of use that Hebern heavily promoted his company to investors, feeling that all companies would soon be using them and his company would clearly be successful. But the company went bankrupt when the war ended, and Hebern eventually landed in prison, convicted of stock manipulation.
Friedman realized that the new rotor machines would be important, and devoted some time to cracking Hebern's design. Over a period of years he discovered a number of problems common to most of the rotor machine designs. Examples of some dangerous features included having the rotors turn once with every keypress, and making the fast rotor (the one that turns with every keypress) at either end of the rotor stack. In this case the output generated by the machines will have strings of 26 letters that form a simple substitution cipher, and by collecting enough cyphertext and applying a standard statistical method known as the kappa test, he showed that he could, albeit with great difficulty, crack any code generated by such a machine.
Friedman then used his understanding of the rotor machines to develop several of his own that remained immune to his own attacks. He eventually developed nine designs, six of which remain still secret today. Some of his inventions while developing these systems only gained patents decades later, since the Defense Department regarded them as so critical that granting a patent would harm national security. The culmination of various earlier designs resulted in the SIGABA, which became the US's highest security encryption system during World War II. It was similar to the British Typex machine, and adapters were apparetnly built which could allow the two machines to interoperate. Neither was, as far as is publicly known, broken during WWII. In fact, SIGABA would still be quite good tady, in the computer era. computers.
In 1939 the Japanese introduced a new cypher machine system for their most secure diplomatic traffic to and from important embassies, replacing an earlier system SIS referred to as Red. The new cypher, referred to as Purple, proved quite difficult to crack. The Navy's OP-20-G and the SIS thought it might relate to the earlier mechanical cypher machines, and the SIS set about attacking it. After spending several months studying the cyphertexts and trying to discover the underlying patterns. Eventually, in an extraordianry achievement, the SIS team figured it out. Like the some of the prior Japanese designs, Purple didn't use 'rotors' unlike the German Enigma or the Hebern design, but used stepper switches like those used in automated telephone exchanges. Leo Rosen of the SIS built a machine and, astonishingly, used the same telephone stepper switch that the Japanese designer had used.
By the end of 1940 Friedman's team at the SIS had constructed an exact duplicate of the Purple machine, even though they had never seen one. With an understanding of Purple and duplicate machines of their own to use, the SIS could then decrypt an increasing amount of the Japanese traffic. One such intercept was the message to the Japanese Embassy in Washington ordering an end (on December 7th 1941) to the negotiations with the US. The message gave a clear indication of impending war, and was to have been delivered to the US State Department only hours prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The pressure of his responsibilites, including the Purple effort was too much and Friedman entered a hospital in 1941 with a nervous breakdown. After his release, he served as Director of Communications Research for the SIS for the rest of the war. Friedman visited the British code-breaking operations at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in 1941. He exchanged information on the techniques for attacking Purple for the British information on how they had broken the Enigma.
Following the WWII, Friedman remained in government signals intelligence. In 1949 he became head of the code division of the newly-formed Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), and in 1952 become the chief cryptologist for the National Security Agency (NSA) when it formed to take over from the AFSA.
Friedman retired in 1956 and turned his attention, with his wife, to the problem that had originally brought them together: examining Bacon's codes. In 1957 they wrote The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, in which they demonstrated unfortunate flaws in Gallup's work. His health began to fail in the late 1960s, and he died in 1969.
Elizebeth Friedman was also heavily involved in cryptography throughout much of the inter-War period, although typically on the civilian side. During the 1920s she gained some fame for repeatedly breaking the cyphers and codes being used by "rum runners" bringing alcohol into the US during Prohibition, and in 1927 the US Coast Guard hired her to help them with their policing operations. By 1930 she had cracked over 12,000 messages for the Coast Guard, the Bureau of Customs, the Bureau of Narcotics, the Bureau of Prohibition, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the Department of Justice.
In 1934 she became involved in a particularly odd case, in which a Canadian-registered ship, the I'm Alone, sank after being chased into international waters off the US. She decoded several messages that demonstrated that a US citizen had actually paid for the ship, which therefore had ostensibe US-ownership. The result expanded the law regarding police chases, allowing a ship involved in illegal activity to be followed into international waters, and thereby extracting the US from an embarrassing political scandal.
During World War II Elizebeth Friedman moved to the OSS and became one of their chief cryptologists. She became involved in a particularly famous case in which a husband-and-wife team were sending coded messages to the Japanese, written on dolls that the wife sold through a thriving mail-order business. Velvalee Dickinson became known as "The Doll Woman" when the case was broken to the press. Elizebeth retired after her husband's death in 1969 and lived on until 1980.
* http://www.nsa.gov/honor/w_friedman.html
* http://www.sans.org/rr/history/friedman.php
In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson withdrew the Bureau's funds, on the ground that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Yardley, jobless in the Depression, awoke America to the importance of cryptology in his best-selling The American Black Chamber (1931). His bureau's work was assumed by the army's tiny Signal Intelligence Service (SIS) under the brilliant cryptologist William F. Friedman. During World War I, Friedman, at the Riverbank Laboratories, a think tank near Chicago, had broken new paths for cryptanalysis; soon after he joined the War Department as a civilian employee in 1921, he reconstructed the locations and starting positions of the rotors in a cipher machine. His work placed the United States at the forefront of world cryptology.
Beginning in 1931, he expanded the SIS, hiring mathematicians first. By 1940, a team under the cryptanalyst Frank B. Rowlett had reconstructed the chief Japanese diplomatic cipher machine, which the Americans called purple. These solutions could not prevent Pearl Harbor because no messages saying anything like "We will attack Pearl Harbor" were ever transmitted; the Japanese diplomats themselves were not told of the attack. Later in the war, however, the solutions of the radiograms of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, enciphered in purple, provided the Allies with what Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall called "our main basis of information regarding Hitler's intentions in Europe." One revealed details of Hitler's Atlantic Wall defenses.
The U.S. Navy's OP-20-G, established in 1924 under Lieutenant Laurence F. Safford, solved Japanese naval codes. This work flowered when the solutions of its branch in Hawaii made possible the American victory at Midway in 1942, the midair shootdown of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943, and the sinking of Japanese freighters throughout the Pacific war, strangling Japan. Its headquarters in Washington cooperated with the British code breaking agency, the Government Code and Cypher School, at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, to solve U-boat messages encrypted in the Enigma rotor cipher machine. This enabled Allied convoys to dodge wolf packs and so help win the Battle of the Atlantic. Teams of American cryptanalysts and tabulating machine engineers went to the British agency to cooperate in solving German Enigma and other cipher systems, shortening the land war in Europe. No other source of information— not spies, aerial photographs, or prisoner interrogations—provided such trustworthy, high-level, voluminous, detailed, and prompt intelligence as code breaking.
Wallace Clement Sabine (1868-1919)
Sabine's Reverberation Formula
Wallace Clement Sabine was a pioneer in architectural acoustics. A century ago he started experiments in the Fogg lecture room at Harvard, to investigate the impact of absorption on the reverberation time. It was on the 29th of October 1898 that he discovered the type of relation between these quantities. Sabine derived an expression for the duration T of the residual sound to decay below the audible intensity, starting from a 1,000,000 times higher initial intensity:
T = 0.161 V/A
where V is the room volume in cubic meters, and A is the total absorption in square meters. Sabine's reverberation formula has been applied successfully for many years to determine material absorption coefficients by means of reverberation rooms. Keeping in mind some conditions with regard to the sound field diffusion and the value of A, Sabine's formula is still widely accepted as a very useful estimation method for the reverberation time in rooms.
Sabin as Unit of Sound Absorption
The unit of sound absorption is square meter, referring to the area of open window. This unit stems from the fact that sound energy travelling toward an open window in a room will not be reflected at all, but completely disappear in the open air outside. The effect would be the same if the open window would be replaced with 100 % absorbing material of the same dimensions.
Therefore, 1 square meter of 100 % absorbing material has an absorption of 1 square meter of open window. In honor of W.C. Sabine, the unit of absorption is also named sabin or metric sabin. However, these units are used not very often. One sabin is the absorption of one square foot of open window, and one metric sabin is the absorption of one square meter of open window.
Symphony Hall
The first auditorium that was designed by Sabine, applying his new insight in acoustics, was the new Boston Music Hall, currently known as the Symphony Hall. It was formally opened on October 15, 1900. Nowadays, it is still considered one of the three finest concert halls in the world.
Also visit the famous Riverbank Laboratories.
References
Wallace C. Sabine: Collected Papers on Acoustics. 1993, Trade Cloth ISBN 0-932146-60-0 Peninsula Publishing, Los Altos, U. S.. LCCN: 93-085708
The Sabines at Riverbank
DISTINGUISHED LECTURER
Leo L. Beranek
Dr. Leo L. Beranek received his Doctorate from Harvard University in 1940 and immediately became director of the WW-II Electro-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard, which effort was the basis for his first book, Acoustical Measurements [ASA revised reprint 1981]. At MIT, he taught a course on electroacoustics and conducted special summer programs on noise control, which led to Acoustics [ASA reprint 1986] and Noise Reduction ]Reprint, Peninsula Publ., 1991]. As President of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, he took part in many consulting projects which led to Noise and Vibration Control [Revised reprint, INCE, 1989] and Music, Acoustics and Architecture. His recent publications have been a 40-page review paper, "Concert Hall Acoustics - 1992", published in the July issue of the Acoustical Society of America, and a completely new book, edited jointly with Istvan Ver, Noise and Vibration Control Engineering, [Wiley, New York, 1992]. Dr. Beranek is presently engaged in writing the second edition of Music, Acoustics and Architecture which will be expanded to contain 30 new halls and will probably be renamed, Concert Halls and Opera Houses of the World.
Dr. Beranek is currently President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the oldest Academy in America. He was Chairman of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was President of Channel Five, WCVB, television in Boston. He also served for six years as a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University. His professional awards have included the Bruce Lindsay, Wallace Sabine and Gold Medal Awards of the Acoustical Society of American and the Gold Medal Award of the Audio Engineering Society. His hobby is skiing.
laAAal WALLACE CLEMENT SABINE CENTENNIAL SYMPOSIUM
lOO - CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA
5 TO 7 JUNE, 1994
ACOUSTICAL CONSULTATION: BRIEF HISTORY BEFORE 1960
Leo L. Beranek
975 Memorial Drive , Suite 804
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Man's desire for quiet dwellings and suitable environments in which to communicate must have been of some importance to civilization from the earliest of times. Archaeologists have uncovered textiles in 8000-year old archeological sites. Textiles are highly perishable and tend to self-destruct with time so they may well have existed for millennia before that. When people began to live in caves, tents or huts, they would have noticed that woven materials, textiles, make a space less reverberant and, hence, more pleasant. Thus the simplest acoustical principle, that porous materials absorb sound, could have been discovered intuitively, even in pre-historic times.
Long before the highly sophisticated time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and continuing through the history of Pompeii and the Roman empire, builders would probably have advised owners on how to make spaces more liveable by adding textiles, or rugs or simply layers of hay to the boundaries of a room. Architects, as the building profession developed, would logically also have become advisors. There is little evidence that acoustical consultation as a distinct profession existed to any extent before the present century.
Because the art of quieting, which probably meant introducing porous materials into spaces, is a natural outgrowth of observation regardless of epoch, I shall confine my remarks largely to the development of acoustical consulting for music performance spaces.
CONSULTANTS BEFORE 1900
Vitruvius , an early Roman architectural educator, was first to record advice on acoustics. He stated that the architect had to understand canonical and mathematical theory and be able to tune strings and resonators to the proper frequencies. He taught that in closed rooms, strings of twisted sinew should be stretched and tuned "until they give the same correct note to the ear of the skilled workman." Also, he taught that bronze vessels tuned in accordance with the musical intervals based on mathematical principles should be placed in niches under seats . He believed that when the voice of an actor fell in unison with any of the resonant frequencies of the vessels, the power of the voice would be increased and "it reaches the ears of the audience with greater clearness and sweetness." Thus he equated the "tuning" of a theater with the tuning of a musical instrument. He said, "by giving heed to these theories, one can easily bring a theatre to perfection, from the point of view of the nature of the voice, so as to give pleasure to the audience." He also taught that a theatre of wood boarding, "which must be resonant," instead of marble, masonry or stone, could be built without using the bronze vessels. He obviously did not realize that the tuned vessels absorbed sound, but instead ascribed their effect as that of adding "resonances" to the voice. For this reason he also recommended their use in outdoor theaters.
For theaters he wrote," that a line drawn from the lowest to the highest seat will touch the top edges and angles of all the seats. Thus the voice will meet with no obstruction." He said that the seats should be ascending so that the power of the voice which radiates vertically as well as horizontally would be more completely distributed over the audience. This is a very good design principle for outdoor theaters where no help is obtained from a sound reflecting ceiling.
Napoleon Le Brun ,the architect for the Philadelphia Academy of Music, designed primarily as an opera house in 1857, said that "They sent me to Milan. I spent some time there, got all the original drawings I could, made measurements and sketches to supplement these." He, and his partner Gustav Runge, changed the plan of the rings from the true horseshoe shape of La Scala in Milan to an open shape, that is to say, a semicircular back combined with two side walls that flare outward as they approach the proscenium. They claimed that the optical and acoustical effects had been very carefully studied. Presumably this meant that they believed, correctly, that better sightlines, for their design, also meant better access of sound waves to the seats in the rings.
Charles Gamier designer of the Opera Gamier in Paris, said in his book, The Grand Opera in Paris, that he had pursued diligently the elusive factors of good acoustics, but he confessed that he finally trusted to luck, "like the acrobat who closes his eyes and clings to the ropes of an ascending balloon." "Eh bien!" he concludes, "Je suis arrive!" He went on, "The credit is not mine, I merely wear the marks of honor. It is not my fault that acoustics and I can never come to an understanding. I gave myself great pains to master this bizarre science, but after fifteen years of labor, I found myself hardly in advance of where 1 stood on the first day....I had read diligently in my books, and conferred industriously with philosophers -- nowhere did I find a positive rule of action to guide me; in the contrary, nothing but contradictory statements. For long months,1 studied, questioned everything, but after this travail, finally 1 made this discovery. A room to have good acoustics must be either long or broad, high or low, of wood or stone, round or square, and so forth....Chance seems as dominant in the theatrical world as it is in the dream world in which a child enters Wonderland!"
ACOUSTICAL CONSULTING THROUGH THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY
Wallace C. Sabine. in the introduction to his 1900 paper titled "Reverberation", summarizes the state of acoustics in 1900: "No one can appreciate the condition of architectural acoustics who has not with a pressing case in hand sought through the scattered literature for some safe guidance." He next comments on, "...the meagerness and inconsistency of the current suggestions. Thus the most definite and often repeated statements are such as the following, that the dimensions of a room should be in the ratio 2:3:5, or according to some writers, 1:1:2:, and others 2:3:4; it is probable that the basis of these suggestions is the ratios of the harmonic intervals in music, but the connection is untraced and remote." "One writer, who had seen the Mormon Tabernacle, recommended that all auditoriums be elliptical. Sanders Theatre is by far the best auditorium in Cambridge and is semicircular in general shape, but with a recess that makes it almost anything; and, on the other hand, the lecture room in the Fogg Art Museum [razed in the 1970's] is also semicircular ... it was the worst. But Sanders Theatre is wood and the Fogg lecture-room is plaster on tile: one seizes on this only to be immediately reminded that Sayles Hall in Providence is largely lined with wood and is bad. Curiously enough, each suggestion is advanced as if it alone were sufficient. As examples of remedies, may be cited the placing of vases about the room for the sake of resonance....and the stretching of wires, even now a frequent though useless device."
In Sabine's first paper, presented at the Annual Convention of the American Institute of Architects, November 2, 1898, and not included in his collected papers, he states that there are three important aspects of acoustics, namely, loudness, interference, and distinctness. He found that optical instruments that measure sound pressure, such as a dancing flame, are of no help in studying acoustics of rooms because of the large amplitude variations from one place to another. He had learned that the ear, listening to sound decay after a source is turned off, could judge accurately its duration, averaging out fluctuations. He had found that judgments of different observers were closely alike and were repeatable in the dozen rooms he had studied. He noted that different uses of a hall, for example, for speech as opposed to piano or chamber music, require different reverberation times. He also observed that the ability of an architectural irregularity to scatter sound reflected from it is greatest when the dimension of the irregularity exceeds a wavelength. This was the status of acoustics one year before he published his famous seven part treatise, "Architectural Acoustics", [Am. Arch. Building News 68, April 7 - June 16, 1900.]
Others at this symposium will discuss Sabine's reverberation equation, his great heritage, but I shall go on to discuss his consulting activities in the years from 1902 until his death in January 1919. Using his reverberation equation as his main tool and acoustical data on building materials obtained in the Harvard laboratory and audience absorption obtained in one Harvard auditorium, he undertook consulting for architects on auditoriums and churches throughout the United States. There is evidence only of satisfied clients in his files.
There is no evidence that he had consulted on any concert hall other than the Boston Symphony Hall, except for controlling reverberation times and room-to-room sound transmission in music practice rooms at the New England Conservatory of Music (1902-04) after it was completed. He consulted on the Boston Opera House (1908)(no longer in existence), which was judged satisfactory, but not as good as the old houses of Europe.
Sabine’s principles were: Reverberation: To control it, he generally recommended areas of hairfelt, one to two inches thick, covered by a porous fabric . About 1911, he developed a consulting relationship with the Johns-Manville Company, and advised them on materials which they were developing and on certain acoustical projects that came to them. He wrote, in 1911, of working with them on the development of an acoustic plaster. In 1910-1915, he worked with the Gustavino Company to develop, first, a porous-ceramic tile and, later, a porous masonry tile, which was first used in the St. Thomas Church (1912) and later the Riverside Church, both in New York City. He also recommended heavy curtains in smaller rooms. For "greatly softening and enriching the organ tones" in a music room, he recommended a "one inch felt" spaced a "quarter of an inch behind the silk" panels in the room. For low frequency absorption, he recommended very thin wood paneling over an inch air space, saying, "heavy wood in a small room will not differ perceptibly from hard plaster." Reflected and Distributed Sound Over an Audience: Sabine recognized the advantage of irregular, as opposed to flat, surfaces for the reflection of sound in auditoriums or churches. He wrote, "...irregularities are recommended on the surface, to make the reflection general rather than in a narrow direction." "It would be well to break the surface in order that its distributing effect may be a maximum." Focusing: "a great arching would be objectionable, but there is no acoustical objection to a moderate ceiling curvature." Diffusion: "...the columns should be fluted to some extent and not plain and unbroken." "..use pilasters and other irregularities of that sort." Ventilation System Quieting: "...the use of felt in ducts to prevent the transmission of sound from blowers and ventilating fans into a room is an old one and is very serviceable." Fees: Sabine's standard fee was $200 (compared to his salary in 1915 as a full professor of $5000 annually) for consulting on any job. On one request for his services to consult on a 4000 seat auditorium, he responded with a quote of $500 plus travel expenses. He lost the assignment to another consultant.
Fled R. Watson was 23 years old when Sabine published his "Architectural Acoustics." His first encounter with auditorium acoustics occurred in 1908 when he was asked by his department head to improve hearing conditions in the University of Illinois Auditorium. He continued his researches in this auditorium until 1916. There being no other books of importance on architectural acoustics, he combined what he found in the literature with his own investigations and produced, in 1923, Acoustics of Buildings, including Acoustics of Auditoriums and Soundproofing of Rooms, (Wiley, New York). This short book became the bible of architects and went through successive editions in 1930 and 1941. Watson became the leading acoustical consultant in the center of the United States.
In the 1930 edition of his book, Watson expounded a theory of "Ideal Auditorium Acoustics" that was in almost complete disagreement with Sabine, the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the European consultants of that time. He wrote: 1) Provide a stage with suitable reflecting surfaces so that performers can "hear themselves," and, 2) Design the auditorium for listening so that the reflected sound will be reduced to be comparable with outdoor conditions.
Watson devoted a chapter to "support this theory." His ultimate example is Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. The hall is square in plan and the seats are arranged as in a football stadium. The "field" is a flat floor (with seats) starting at the stage and rising at an angle of 2 ° until the base of the stadium seating. A row of boxes separates it from the stadium seating which, in turn, rises steeply nearly to the top of the side walls. He writes, "..the reflection of sound from the side walls is practically eliminated ... Sound thus passes directly to the auditors with one reflection from the ceiling. Secondary reflections are very weak....The ceiling ... is treated with an absorbing material." He concludes by saying, "The acoustic advances during the past ten years since the author set forth this theory appear to confirm the principles underlying the ideal." Constitution Hall was the only concert hall in Washington, D.C., until the J. F. Kennedy Center was opened in 1971. Parenthetically it was ranked the lowest in acoustical quality of all concert halls in this country. Watson was the consultant on many projects, among which were three other halls for music, the Purdue University Hall, (6100 seats, 1.45 sec at mid-frequencies, occupied); the Indiana University Auditorium (3700 seats, 1.4 sec) and the Eastman Theatre (3350 seats, 1.65 sec). These halls are conventional and have been satisfactory for opera, although less so for symphonic music..
Clifford Swan was probably Sabine's only student who practiced in the acoustical field. After Sabine established his relation with Johns-Manville, they asked him to help them find an engineer who could take charge of their consultation for customers. Sabine recommended Swan and Swan later stated that J-M had handled over 800 building acoustics projects before 1935. Swan's principle acoustical responsibility for a hall for music, was the multi-purpose Worcester (Massachusetts) Memorial Auditorium. This hall was built without any reflecting surfaces either of the overhead type or at the sides to provide early lateral reflections. It has never been judged suitable for concert and opera, although it was used exclusively in Worcester for both until the recent renovation of the Worcester Mechanics Hall in the 1970's.
Hope Bagenal was England's leading independent acoustical consultant from about 1922 to 1960. He often consulted in cooperation with the Building Research Station , specifically on three halls that opened in 1951 during the Festival of England celebration. These were Royal Festival Hall in London, Free Trade Hall in Manchester and Colston Hall in Bristol. His philosophy of concert hall design was expounded in his book of 1942, Practical Acoustics and planning against noise. (Chemical Publishing, New York). Reverberation: Bagenal wrote that for a good concert hall, fully occupied, the reverberation time at middle frequencies ought to be 1.6 to 2 seconds by the Sabine formula. For proper hearing of choral works 2 seconds should be a minimum and smaller halls for strings and solo instruments require the shorter figure. He generalizes, for bass absorption use wood linings, or plaster on wood lath; for the middle range, audience or its equivalent in thick felts, mattressing or upholstery; and for upper muddle notes use curtains in light folds. In the upper registers, because of air absorption, he said that it is well to provide a good area of glossy surface such as polished wood paneling to increase reflection in that region. In regard to the frequency characteristic of reverberation, he generalizes that, "...between 500 and 4000 Hz ... the curve should be level with a gradual slope [upward] towards the bass ... The rise in bass should probably be rather more for the case of larger halls ... and rather less, or even level, for smaller concert rooms.... The aim is now to distribute a partial absorption over the main bounding surfaces, so as to get controlled inter reflection from opposite pairs of parallel walls and hence the desirable type of reverberation." Early Reflections: There must be enough first-reflection sound to give definition...[for this] a good area of useful reflectors is required near the platform. Diffusion: Bagenal devotes almost no space to irregularities on wall surfaces. He says in two sentences in his book, "It is also possible to increase random reverberation by the method of diffusion.... diffusion can be of great use in concert halls to distribute loudness and prevent echoes..."
Bagenal joined with A. B. Wood to produce Planning for Good Acoustics (Methuen, London, 1931) which was of great importance for architects and acoustical consultants in the design of architectural spaces of all kinds, including concert halls and opera houses. They emphasize the close connection between the human aspects of satisfaction with an acoustic space and the physics of its design. Their chapter on "Designing for Musical Requirements," gives the usual list of characteristics that affect musical quality. They use as the best example of a hall that is "a true instrument to the music produced within it," the Leipzig Gewandhaus (destroyed in WW-II. Other halls mentioned favorably include London's Queen's Hall, Berlin's Beethoven Hall and Manchester's Trade Hall, all of which were destroyed. They also remark on three opera houses, San Carlo Theatre in Naples, the Wagner Opera House in Bayreuth, Germany, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London. One has to note that they strongly advocate the use of wood in halls intended for music, saying that "placed near the source will increase the loudness," "improves the tone quality," and "brightens the tone." Actually, the effect is reduction of the bass, which is necessary in smaller halls without heavily upholstered seats.
In his later years, Mr. Bagenal worked closely with William Allen and P. H. Parkin of England's Building Research Station , and, with them, consulted on the Royal Festival Hall, and others. It is interesting to read Parkin and Humphreys' book written after completion of London's Royal Festival Hall, (Acoustics, Noise and Buildings (Faber and Faber, London, 1958). They comment on the state of concert hall acoustics at that date, page 82, "The present state of knowledge about the acoustics of rooms for music is such that major faults (such as echoes) can be avoided in the design ... nearly all the advice that can be given is qualitative only, at this stage of knowledge. The one important exception is the reverberation time which can be specified (at least within a range of values) and which can be calculated beforehand with a fair degree of accuracy ... [It] is the only acoustical quality that can be measured objectively."
The most general characteristic among the three halls which opened in 1951 in London, Manchester and Bristol, is a large, three-part canopy shaped both to return sound to the orchestra and to distribute, excluding under-balcony spaces, early sound in equal proportion to all parts of the audience. All three halls have elements on the side walls or the ceiling that diffuse the reverberant sound field and all have areas of seating behind or at the sides of the orchestra. All have reverberation times in the range of 1.5 to 1.7 seconds. These relatively low reverberations were not intended, but resulted primarily from insufficient assignment of sound absorption to audience occupied areas.
Paul E. Sabine, a distant cousin of Wallace Sabine, was famous not as an acoustical consultant, but as the Director of the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois, the official U. S. testing station of the sound absorption and sound transmission properties of building elements. However, he did consult on a few concert halls and his 1932 book, Acoustics and Architecture (McGraw-Hill, New York), was widely purchased by architects. In his chapter on "Acoustics in Auditorium Design", he spends considerable time discussing the need to avoid curved focusing surfaces in the region around the orchestra. When he turns to an analysis of Carnegie Hall in New York, he states, "Here is little, if any, trace of acoustical purpose." He concludes the chapter, "All of which serves to emphasize the point originally made, that the acoustical side of the designer's problem consists more in avoiding sources of difficulty than in producing positive virtues."
In commenting on F. R. Watson's thesis that the audience part of a concert hall should be as dead as outdoors, Sabine says, "In one or two instances ... this has led to unsatisfactory hearing in the front of the room, while seats in the rear prove quite satisfactory." For stage floors he advocated a light wood construction with an air space below to serve to amplify the fundamental tones of cellos and double basses.
Vein O. Knudsen. born in 1893, joined the faculty at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1922. Emily A. Thompson writes (Ph. D. Thesis, Princeton University, October 1992), "[In 1932] Knudsen published Architectural Acoustics (Wiley). Like Watson's and Bagenal and Wood's texts, [it] was intended as a guidebook for architects and engineers. Encompassing all the research that had been undertaken in the ten years since Watson's book had been issued, Knudsen's treatise was much denser..." Knudsen was involved in the correction of faults in many lecture rooms and auditoriums, particularly on the West Coast. His book devotes only eighteen pages to the subject of "The Acoustics of Music Rooms." In it he lists the most important considerations of that time: (1) There should be suitably designed boundaries in the proximity of the stage or platfonn, thus giving support to the generation of music; (2) Proper reverberation should be provided [later he lists optimum times of reverberation for different sizes and purposes of rooms]; (3) There should be no focusing, no echoes and no noise; and (4) the acoustical properties of the room should be independent of the size of the audience in the room [by using heavily upholstered chairs]. He made a large contribution to acoustics a year after the appearance of his book, in a paper on the absorption of sound in air itself, particularly important at frequencies above 1000 Hz, and easily observed in air of low humidity. Knudsen is well known for his consultation on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion concert hall in Los Angeles and other halls throughout the United States, several in collaboration with his colleague Paul Veneklasen. In 1950, Knudsen co-authored with his UCLA colleague Cyril Harris, "Acoustical Designing in Architecture, (Wiley), which treats the problems of halls for music in a general way.
Lothar Cremer first in Munich and later as Professor of Acoustics in the Berlin's Technical University, was one of Germany's leading acoustical consultants. After the destruction of most of the housing and public buildings in Germany's large cities, he was present at all national planning meetings, and was a representative of the Gennan universities at international standards conferences for many years afterwards. Cremer opened a consulting business in Munich and his first colleague was Helmut Mueller. In 1962, Mueller-BBM was formed in Munich to take over the consulting business of Cremer and to meet the growing demand for services to architects and designers of power plants and factories.
Cremer wrote a series of books, the first, dated August 1948 in Munich, is dedicated to Professor Erwin Meyer, who, he says, was his teacher and who for more than ten years encouraged him to write the book. He begins by spending considerable time on echoes and resonances in halls, using as his examples of unsatisfactory conditions, the Royal Albert Hall in London (with exposed, untreated domed ceiling), the Prinzregententheater in Munich, a university auditorium in Freiburg and an enclosed (Greek type) amphitheater in Hoersales. He also discusses the phenomenon of "flutter echo" between parallel flat walls.
The first practical application of his earlier chapters is the design of reflector surfaces (and partial enclosures) around a pulpit to direct the sound of a talker toward the congregation and to reduce the energy that would otherwise reach the upper spaces of a cathedral. This leads to a discussion of the reflecting surfaces in a speech auditorium and outdoors in the Hollywood Bowl. Next he treats the Sale Pleyel (concert hall) in Paris. He showed that the parabolic-shape of the sending end of the hall, directed the orchestral music to the balconies, but with the disadvantages that the musicians were disturbed by the audience noise which was focused back on them and by the fact that none of their own sound was reflected among themselves, so that ensemble was difficult.
He discusses the sound-absorbing treatments used thereto reduce the echo and feedback of audience noise to the orchestra. He concludes that the Saal Pleyel experience proves that the ceiling over the orchestra and over the audience should be low and so shaped that the first reflections augment the direct sound and that by use of sound absorbing materials on all distant surfaces, all delayed reflections are suppressed. In this sense, he approaches the concept that F. R. Watson taught of the live sending end and an out-doors receiving end.
Cremer then shows an example of a parliament hall that he says is well designed, because it has a sloped backwall and an overhead reflecting ceiling that directs the sound to the delegates and the public. Finally, he concludes this chapter by discussing good and poor forms of balcony overhangs; the poor one with a low entrance that prevents the listeners from receiving much sound and an open one with a reflecting ceiling that gather the sound and distributes it over the audience beneath. He also discusses a recommended slope upwards of the audience seating so as to preserve good sight-lines and accompanying good hearing conditions..
Cremer is best known today for his cooperation with architect Hans Scharoun on Berlin's largest concert hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, dedicated in 1963, which has received architectural acclaim and good acoustical acceptance. But, this was an interesting collaboration. Scharoun decided he wanted to build a hall in which the audience was close to the orchestra, indeed surrounding it. R. S. Lanier writes (Architectural Forum, 120, May 1964) "The seats rise steeply all around in irregularly shaped sections which Scharoun aptly calls 'vineyards ; they are much like row-planted plots of varying shapes and sizes on the sides of a hill. [Scharoun said] it changes the very nature of the audience: the audience becomes less an oppressive mass and more an interestingly varied assembly, both to itself and to the musicians." Cremer was opposed to the acoustically risky solution of deviating from the classical rectangular hall. He even had me meet with him and the architect to help support Cremer's concern over the dangers of such a radical departure into the unknown. However, Scharoun persisted, and Cremer added every feature that he thought would improve the situation - reflecting side surfaces, diffusing irregularities on the ceiling, adjustable low frequency absorbing resonators in case there was bass boom, good reflecting surfaces at the sides and rear of the stage and ten trapezoidal reflectors above the stage, to improve inter-section communication among the musicians.
Erwin Meyer, of the University of Goettingten, Drittes Physics Institute, was a contemporary of Cremer's, who consulted on many architectural projects. He was best known for the research done in his laboratories which was liberally published and has influenced the work of all consultants to this day. The best example of his philosophy of concert hall acoustics is the Beethoven Halle in Bonn, Germany (l 969, 1400 seats). He accepted the architect's design of a curved (segment of a circle) ceiling and he prescribed covering it with a series of 1760 acoustical elements designed to scatter the sound impinging on them but also to absorb sound in the region of 125 Hz to eliminate the effects of sound focusing. Vertically-oriented, cylindrical, sound-diffusers cover most of the side walls and interspersed among them are areas of sound absorption used to give the reverberation times a flat frequency characteristic.
TOWARD THE FUTURE
During the 1950's, I attempted to arrive at a set of guide lines for the acoustical design of halls for music through a study of a large number of concert halls and opera houses in Europe, England and the Western Hemisphere. The results and conclusions drawn from the data, which then could be measured either electronically or from architectural drawings, were published in Music, Acoustics, and Architecture, (Wiley, 1962). That study and the widely discussed problems with London's Royal Festival Hall (l 951) and New York's Philharmonic Hall (1962), led to growing interest in research on halls for music. Today, at least ten acoustical quantities can be measured accurately with modern computer based instrumentation and intensive research is underway to understand the psychoacoustic implications. International conferences, acoustics seminars and frequent meetings of several world-active acoustical societies occur in ever proliferating numbers.
Great laboratories in most of the industrial countries are actively engaged in acoustical research. Recently, I tried to gauge the state of progress in a review paper, L. L. Beranek, "Concert hall acoustics -- 1992," (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 92, 1-39). Michael Barron just published an extensive text including modern data on many concert halls, opera houses and multi-purpose halls [Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design, E & FN Spon and Chapman & Hall, London and New York (l993). This intense international activity promises that acoustical design in the future will combine science and art to permit more accurate prediction of the quality of acoustics in newly completed halls.
This review intentionally omits the world-wide contributions made in the past 30 years by dozens of research and consulting acousticians and psychoacousticians, some of whom are presenting papers during this symposium. I wish to thank them for contributing to my better understanding of this field and for their help in preparation of this paper and my 1992 review paper.
Leo L. Beranek
Dr. Leo L. Beranek received his Doctorate from Harvard University in 1940 and immediately became director of the WW-II Electro-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard, which effort was the basis for his first book, Acoustical Measurements [ASA revised reprint 1981]. At MIT, he taught a course on electroacoustics and conducted special summer programs on noise control, which led to Acoustics [ASA reprint 1986] and Noise Reduction ]Reprint, Peninsula Publ., 1991]. As President of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, he took part in many consulting projects which led to Noise and Vibration Control [Revised reprint, INCE, 1989] and Music, Acoustics and Architecture. His recent publications have been a 40-page review paper, "Concert Hall Acoustics - 1992", published in the July issue of the Acoustical Society of America, and a completely new book, edited jointly with Istvan Ver, Noise and Vibration Control Engineering, [Wiley, New York, 1992]. Dr. Beranek is presently engaged in writing the second edition of Music, Acoustics and Architecture which will be expanded to contain 30 new halls and will probably be renamed, Concert Halls and Opera Houses of the World.
Dr. Beranek is currently President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the oldest Academy in America. He was Chairman of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and was President of Channel Five, WCVB, television in Boston. He also served for six years as a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University. His professional awards have included the Bruce Lindsay, Wallace Sabine and Gold Medal Awards of the Acoustical Society of American and the Gold Medal Award of the Audio Engineering Society. His hobby is skiing.
laAAal WALLACE CLEMENT SABINE CENTENNIAL SYMPOSIUM
lOO - CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, USA
5 TO 7 JUNE, 1994
ACOUSTICAL CONSULTATION: BRIEF HISTORY BEFORE 1960
Leo L. Beranek
975 Memorial Drive , Suite 804
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Man's desire for quiet dwellings and suitable environments in which to communicate must have been of some importance to civilization from the earliest of times. Archaeologists have uncovered textiles in 8000-year old archeological sites. Textiles are highly perishable and tend to self-destruct with time so they may well have existed for millennia before that. When people began to live in caves, tents or huts, they would have noticed that woven materials, textiles, make a space less reverberant and, hence, more pleasant. Thus the simplest acoustical principle, that porous materials absorb sound, could have been discovered intuitively, even in pre-historic times.
Long before the highly sophisticated time of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and continuing through the history of Pompeii and the Roman empire, builders would probably have advised owners on how to make spaces more liveable by adding textiles, or rugs or simply layers of hay to the boundaries of a room. Architects, as the building profession developed, would logically also have become advisors. There is little evidence that acoustical consultation as a distinct profession existed to any extent before the present century.
Because the art of quieting, which probably meant introducing porous materials into spaces, is a natural outgrowth of observation regardless of epoch, I shall confine my remarks largely to the development of acoustical consulting for music performance spaces.
CONSULTANTS BEFORE 1900
Vitruvius , an early Roman architectural educator, was first to record advice on acoustics. He stated that the architect had to understand canonical and mathematical theory and be able to tune strings and resonators to the proper frequencies. He taught that in closed rooms, strings of twisted sinew should be stretched and tuned "until they give the same correct note to the ear of the skilled workman." Also, he taught that bronze vessels tuned in accordance with the musical intervals based on mathematical principles should be placed in niches under seats . He believed that when the voice of an actor fell in unison with any of the resonant frequencies of the vessels, the power of the voice would be increased and "it reaches the ears of the audience with greater clearness and sweetness." Thus he equated the "tuning" of a theater with the tuning of a musical instrument. He said, "by giving heed to these theories, one can easily bring a theatre to perfection, from the point of view of the nature of the voice, so as to give pleasure to the audience." He also taught that a theatre of wood boarding, "which must be resonant," instead of marble, masonry or stone, could be built without using the bronze vessels. He obviously did not realize that the tuned vessels absorbed sound, but instead ascribed their effect as that of adding "resonances" to the voice. For this reason he also recommended their use in outdoor theaters.
For theaters he wrote," that a line drawn from the lowest to the highest seat will touch the top edges and angles of all the seats. Thus the voice will meet with no obstruction." He said that the seats should be ascending so that the power of the voice which radiates vertically as well as horizontally would be more completely distributed over the audience. This is a very good design principle for outdoor theaters where no help is obtained from a sound reflecting ceiling.
Napoleon Le Brun ,the architect for the Philadelphia Academy of Music, designed primarily as an opera house in 1857, said that "They sent me to Milan. I spent some time there, got all the original drawings I could, made measurements and sketches to supplement these." He, and his partner Gustav Runge, changed the plan of the rings from the true horseshoe shape of La Scala in Milan to an open shape, that is to say, a semicircular back combined with two side walls that flare outward as they approach the proscenium. They claimed that the optical and acoustical effects had been very carefully studied. Presumably this meant that they believed, correctly, that better sightlines, for their design, also meant better access of sound waves to the seats in the rings.
Charles Gamier designer of the Opera Gamier in Paris, said in his book, The Grand Opera in Paris, that he had pursued diligently the elusive factors of good acoustics, but he confessed that he finally trusted to luck, "like the acrobat who closes his eyes and clings to the ropes of an ascending balloon." "Eh bien!" he concludes, "Je suis arrive!" He went on, "The credit is not mine, I merely wear the marks of honor. It is not my fault that acoustics and I can never come to an understanding. I gave myself great pains to master this bizarre science, but after fifteen years of labor, I found myself hardly in advance of where 1 stood on the first day....I had read diligently in my books, and conferred industriously with philosophers -- nowhere did I find a positive rule of action to guide me; in the contrary, nothing but contradictory statements. For long months,1 studied, questioned everything, but after this travail, finally 1 made this discovery. A room to have good acoustics must be either long or broad, high or low, of wood or stone, round or square, and so forth....Chance seems as dominant in the theatrical world as it is in the dream world in which a child enters Wonderland!"
ACOUSTICAL CONSULTING THROUGH THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY
Wallace C. Sabine. in the introduction to his 1900 paper titled "Reverberation", summarizes the state of acoustics in 1900: "No one can appreciate the condition of architectural acoustics who has not with a pressing case in hand sought through the scattered literature for some safe guidance." He next comments on, "...the meagerness and inconsistency of the current suggestions. Thus the most definite and often repeated statements are such as the following, that the dimensions of a room should be in the ratio 2:3:5, or according to some writers, 1:1:2:, and others 2:3:4; it is probable that the basis of these suggestions is the ratios of the harmonic intervals in music, but the connection is untraced and remote." "One writer, who had seen the Mormon Tabernacle, recommended that all auditoriums be elliptical. Sanders Theatre is by far the best auditorium in Cambridge and is semicircular in general shape, but with a recess that makes it almost anything; and, on the other hand, the lecture room in the Fogg Art Museum [razed in the 1970's] is also semicircular ... it was the worst. But Sanders Theatre is wood and the Fogg lecture-room is plaster on tile: one seizes on this only to be immediately reminded that Sayles Hall in Providence is largely lined with wood and is bad. Curiously enough, each suggestion is advanced as if it alone were sufficient. As examples of remedies, may be cited the placing of vases about the room for the sake of resonance....and the stretching of wires, even now a frequent though useless device."
In Sabine's first paper, presented at the Annual Convention of the American Institute of Architects, November 2, 1898, and not included in his collected papers, he states that there are three important aspects of acoustics, namely, loudness, interference, and distinctness. He found that optical instruments that measure sound pressure, such as a dancing flame, are of no help in studying acoustics of rooms because of the large amplitude variations from one place to another. He had learned that the ear, listening to sound decay after a source is turned off, could judge accurately its duration, averaging out fluctuations. He had found that judgments of different observers were closely alike and were repeatable in the dozen rooms he had studied. He noted that different uses of a hall, for example, for speech as opposed to piano or chamber music, require different reverberation times. He also observed that the ability of an architectural irregularity to scatter sound reflected from it is greatest when the dimension of the irregularity exceeds a wavelength. This was the status of acoustics one year before he published his famous seven part treatise, "Architectural Acoustics", [Am. Arch. Building News 68, April 7 - June 16, 1900.]
Others at this symposium will discuss Sabine's reverberation equation, his great heritage, but I shall go on to discuss his consulting activities in the years from 1902 until his death in January 1919. Using his reverberation equation as his main tool and acoustical data on building materials obtained in the Harvard laboratory and audience absorption obtained in one Harvard auditorium, he undertook consulting for architects on auditoriums and churches throughout the United States. There is evidence only of satisfied clients in his files.
There is no evidence that he had consulted on any concert hall other than the Boston Symphony Hall, except for controlling reverberation times and room-to-room sound transmission in music practice rooms at the New England Conservatory of Music (1902-04) after it was completed. He consulted on the Boston Opera House (1908)(no longer in existence), which was judged satisfactory, but not as good as the old houses of Europe.
Sabine’s principles were: Reverberation: To control it, he generally recommended areas of hairfelt, one to two inches thick, covered by a porous fabric . About 1911, he developed a consulting relationship with the Johns-Manville Company, and advised them on materials which they were developing and on certain acoustical projects that came to them. He wrote, in 1911, of working with them on the development of an acoustic plaster. In 1910-1915, he worked with the Gustavino Company to develop, first, a porous-ceramic tile and, later, a porous masonry tile, which was first used in the St. Thomas Church (1912) and later the Riverside Church, both in New York City. He also recommended heavy curtains in smaller rooms. For "greatly softening and enriching the organ tones" in a music room, he recommended a "one inch felt" spaced a "quarter of an inch behind the silk" panels in the room. For low frequency absorption, he recommended very thin wood paneling over an inch air space, saying, "heavy wood in a small room will not differ perceptibly from hard plaster." Reflected and Distributed Sound Over an Audience: Sabine recognized the advantage of irregular, as opposed to flat, surfaces for the reflection of sound in auditoriums or churches. He wrote, "...irregularities are recommended on the surface, to make the reflection general rather than in a narrow direction." "It would be well to break the surface in order that its distributing effect may be a maximum." Focusing: "a great arching would be objectionable, but there is no acoustical objection to a moderate ceiling curvature." Diffusion: "...the columns should be fluted to some extent and not plain and unbroken." "..use pilasters and other irregularities of that sort." Ventilation System Quieting: "...the use of felt in ducts to prevent the transmission of sound from blowers and ventilating fans into a room is an old one and is very serviceable." Fees: Sabine's standard fee was $200 (compared to his salary in 1915 as a full professor of $5000 annually) for consulting on any job. On one request for his services to consult on a 4000 seat auditorium, he responded with a quote of $500 plus travel expenses. He lost the assignment to another consultant.
Fled R. Watson was 23 years old when Sabine published his "Architectural Acoustics." His first encounter with auditorium acoustics occurred in 1908 when he was asked by his department head to improve hearing conditions in the University of Illinois Auditorium. He continued his researches in this auditorium until 1916. There being no other books of importance on architectural acoustics, he combined what he found in the literature with his own investigations and produced, in 1923, Acoustics of Buildings, including Acoustics of Auditoriums and Soundproofing of Rooms, (Wiley, New York). This short book became the bible of architects and went through successive editions in 1930 and 1941. Watson became the leading acoustical consultant in the center of the United States.
In the 1930 edition of his book, Watson expounded a theory of "Ideal Auditorium Acoustics" that was in almost complete disagreement with Sabine, the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the European consultants of that time. He wrote: 1) Provide a stage with suitable reflecting surfaces so that performers can "hear themselves," and, 2) Design the auditorium for listening so that the reflected sound will be reduced to be comparable with outdoor conditions.
Watson devoted a chapter to "support this theory." His ultimate example is Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. The hall is square in plan and the seats are arranged as in a football stadium. The "field" is a flat floor (with seats) starting at the stage and rising at an angle of 2 ° until the base of the stadium seating. A row of boxes separates it from the stadium seating which, in turn, rises steeply nearly to the top of the side walls. He writes, "..the reflection of sound from the side walls is practically eliminated ... Sound thus passes directly to the auditors with one reflection from the ceiling. Secondary reflections are very weak....The ceiling ... is treated with an absorbing material." He concludes by saying, "The acoustic advances during the past ten years since the author set forth this theory appear to confirm the principles underlying the ideal." Constitution Hall was the only concert hall in Washington, D.C., until the J. F. Kennedy Center was opened in 1971. Parenthetically it was ranked the lowest in acoustical quality of all concert halls in this country. Watson was the consultant on many projects, among which were three other halls for music, the Purdue University Hall, (6100 seats, 1.45 sec at mid-frequencies, occupied); the Indiana University Auditorium (3700 seats, 1.4 sec) and the Eastman Theatre (3350 seats, 1.65 sec). These halls are conventional and have been satisfactory for opera, although less so for symphonic music..
Clifford Swan was probably Sabine's only student who practiced in the acoustical field. After Sabine established his relation with Johns-Manville, they asked him to help them find an engineer who could take charge of their consultation for customers. Sabine recommended Swan and Swan later stated that J-M had handled over 800 building acoustics projects before 1935. Swan's principle acoustical responsibility for a hall for music, was the multi-purpose Worcester (Massachusetts) Memorial Auditorium. This hall was built without any reflecting surfaces either of the overhead type or at the sides to provide early lateral reflections. It has never been judged suitable for concert and opera, although it was used exclusively in Worcester for both until the recent renovation of the Worcester Mechanics Hall in the 1970's.
Hope Bagenal was England's leading independent acoustical consultant from about 1922 to 1960. He often consulted in cooperation with the Building Research Station , specifically on three halls that opened in 1951 during the Festival of England celebration. These were Royal Festival Hall in London, Free Trade Hall in Manchester and Colston Hall in Bristol. His philosophy of concert hall design was expounded in his book of 1942, Practical Acoustics and planning against noise. (Chemical Publishing, New York). Reverberation: Bagenal wrote that for a good concert hall, fully occupied, the reverberation time at middle frequencies ought to be 1.6 to 2 seconds by the Sabine formula. For proper hearing of choral works 2 seconds should be a minimum and smaller halls for strings and solo instruments require the shorter figure. He generalizes, for bass absorption use wood linings, or plaster on wood lath; for the middle range, audience or its equivalent in thick felts, mattressing or upholstery; and for upper muddle notes use curtains in light folds. In the upper registers, because of air absorption, he said that it is well to provide a good area of glossy surface such as polished wood paneling to increase reflection in that region. In regard to the frequency characteristic of reverberation, he generalizes that, "...between 500 and 4000 Hz ... the curve should be level with a gradual slope [upward] towards the bass ... The rise in bass should probably be rather more for the case of larger halls ... and rather less, or even level, for smaller concert rooms.... The aim is now to distribute a partial absorption over the main bounding surfaces, so as to get controlled inter reflection from opposite pairs of parallel walls and hence the desirable type of reverberation." Early Reflections: There must be enough first-reflection sound to give definition...[for this] a good area of useful reflectors is required near the platform. Diffusion: Bagenal devotes almost no space to irregularities on wall surfaces. He says in two sentences in his book, "It is also possible to increase random reverberation by the method of diffusion.... diffusion can be of great use in concert halls to distribute loudness and prevent echoes..."
Bagenal joined with A. B. Wood to produce Planning for Good Acoustics (Methuen, London, 1931) which was of great importance for architects and acoustical consultants in the design of architectural spaces of all kinds, including concert halls and opera houses. They emphasize the close connection between the human aspects of satisfaction with an acoustic space and the physics of its design. Their chapter on "Designing for Musical Requirements," gives the usual list of characteristics that affect musical quality. They use as the best example of a hall that is "a true instrument to the music produced within it," the Leipzig Gewandhaus (destroyed in WW-II. Other halls mentioned favorably include London's Queen's Hall, Berlin's Beethoven Hall and Manchester's Trade Hall, all of which were destroyed. They also remark on three opera houses, San Carlo Theatre in Naples, the Wagner Opera House in Bayreuth, Germany, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London. One has to note that they strongly advocate the use of wood in halls intended for music, saying that "placed near the source will increase the loudness," "improves the tone quality," and "brightens the tone." Actually, the effect is reduction of the bass, which is necessary in smaller halls without heavily upholstered seats.
In his later years, Mr. Bagenal worked closely with William Allen and P. H. Parkin of England's Building Research Station , and, with them, consulted on the Royal Festival Hall, and others. It is interesting to read Parkin and Humphreys' book written after completion of London's Royal Festival Hall, (Acoustics, Noise and Buildings (Faber and Faber, London, 1958). They comment on the state of concert hall acoustics at that date, page 82, "The present state of knowledge about the acoustics of rooms for music is such that major faults (such as echoes) can be avoided in the design ... nearly all the advice that can be given is qualitative only, at this stage of knowledge. The one important exception is the reverberation time which can be specified (at least within a range of values) and which can be calculated beforehand with a fair degree of accuracy ... [It] is the only acoustical quality that can be measured objectively."
The most general characteristic among the three halls which opened in 1951 in London, Manchester and Bristol, is a large, three-part canopy shaped both to return sound to the orchestra and to distribute, excluding under-balcony spaces, early sound in equal proportion to all parts of the audience. All three halls have elements on the side walls or the ceiling that diffuse the reverberant sound field and all have areas of seating behind or at the sides of the orchestra. All have reverberation times in the range of 1.5 to 1.7 seconds. These relatively low reverberations were not intended, but resulted primarily from insufficient assignment of sound absorption to audience occupied areas.
Paul E. Sabine, a distant cousin of Wallace Sabine, was famous not as an acoustical consultant, but as the Director of the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories in Geneva, Illinois, the official U. S. testing station of the sound absorption and sound transmission properties of building elements. However, he did consult on a few concert halls and his 1932 book, Acoustics and Architecture (McGraw-Hill, New York), was widely purchased by architects. In his chapter on "Acoustics in Auditorium Design", he spends considerable time discussing the need to avoid curved focusing surfaces in the region around the orchestra. When he turns to an analysis of Carnegie Hall in New York, he states, "Here is little, if any, trace of acoustical purpose." He concludes the chapter, "All of which serves to emphasize the point originally made, that the acoustical side of the designer's problem consists more in avoiding sources of difficulty than in producing positive virtues."
In commenting on F. R. Watson's thesis that the audience part of a concert hall should be as dead as outdoors, Sabine says, "In one or two instances ... this has led to unsatisfactory hearing in the front of the room, while seats in the rear prove quite satisfactory." For stage floors he advocated a light wood construction with an air space below to serve to amplify the fundamental tones of cellos and double basses.
Vein O. Knudsen. born in 1893, joined the faculty at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1922. Emily A. Thompson writes (Ph. D. Thesis, Princeton University, October 1992), "[In 1932] Knudsen published Architectural Acoustics (Wiley). Like Watson's and Bagenal and Wood's texts, [it] was intended as a guidebook for architects and engineers. Encompassing all the research that had been undertaken in the ten years since Watson's book had been issued, Knudsen's treatise was much denser..." Knudsen was involved in the correction of faults in many lecture rooms and auditoriums, particularly on the West Coast. His book devotes only eighteen pages to the subject of "The Acoustics of Music Rooms." In it he lists the most important considerations of that time: (1) There should be suitably designed boundaries in the proximity of the stage or platfonn, thus giving support to the generation of music; (2) Proper reverberation should be provided [later he lists optimum times of reverberation for different sizes and purposes of rooms]; (3) There should be no focusing, no echoes and no noise; and (4) the acoustical properties of the room should be independent of the size of the audience in the room [by using heavily upholstered chairs]. He made a large contribution to acoustics a year after the appearance of his book, in a paper on the absorption of sound in air itself, particularly important at frequencies above 1000 Hz, and easily observed in air of low humidity. Knudsen is well known for his consultation on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion concert hall in Los Angeles and other halls throughout the United States, several in collaboration with his colleague Paul Veneklasen. In 1950, Knudsen co-authored with his UCLA colleague Cyril Harris, "Acoustical Designing in Architecture, (Wiley), which treats the problems of halls for music in a general way.
Lothar Cremer first in Munich and later as Professor of Acoustics in the Berlin's Technical University, was one of Germany's leading acoustical consultants. After the destruction of most of the housing and public buildings in Germany's large cities, he was present at all national planning meetings, and was a representative of the Gennan universities at international standards conferences for many years afterwards. Cremer opened a consulting business in Munich and his first colleague was Helmut Mueller. In 1962, Mueller-BBM was formed in Munich to take over the consulting business of Cremer and to meet the growing demand for services to architects and designers of power plants and factories.
Cremer wrote a series of books, the first, dated August 1948 in Munich, is dedicated to Professor Erwin Meyer, who, he says, was his teacher and who for more than ten years encouraged him to write the book. He begins by spending considerable time on echoes and resonances in halls, using as his examples of unsatisfactory conditions, the Royal Albert Hall in London (with exposed, untreated domed ceiling), the Prinzregententheater in Munich, a university auditorium in Freiburg and an enclosed (Greek type) amphitheater in Hoersales. He also discusses the phenomenon of "flutter echo" between parallel flat walls.
The first practical application of his earlier chapters is the design of reflector surfaces (and partial enclosures) around a pulpit to direct the sound of a talker toward the congregation and to reduce the energy that would otherwise reach the upper spaces of a cathedral. This leads to a discussion of the reflecting surfaces in a speech auditorium and outdoors in the Hollywood Bowl. Next he treats the Sale Pleyel (concert hall) in Paris. He showed that the parabolic-shape of the sending end of the hall, directed the orchestral music to the balconies, but with the disadvantages that the musicians were disturbed by the audience noise which was focused back on them and by the fact that none of their own sound was reflected among themselves, so that ensemble was difficult.
He discusses the sound-absorbing treatments used thereto reduce the echo and feedback of audience noise to the orchestra. He concludes that the Saal Pleyel experience proves that the ceiling over the orchestra and over the audience should be low and so shaped that the first reflections augment the direct sound and that by use of sound absorbing materials on all distant surfaces, all delayed reflections are suppressed. In this sense, he approaches the concept that F. R. Watson taught of the live sending end and an out-doors receiving end.
Cremer then shows an example of a parliament hall that he says is well designed, because it has a sloped backwall and an overhead reflecting ceiling that directs the sound to the delegates and the public. Finally, he concludes this chapter by discussing good and poor forms of balcony overhangs; the poor one with a low entrance that prevents the listeners from receiving much sound and an open one with a reflecting ceiling that gather the sound and distributes it over the audience beneath. He also discusses a recommended slope upwards of the audience seating so as to preserve good sight-lines and accompanying good hearing conditions..
Cremer is best known today for his cooperation with architect Hans Scharoun on Berlin's largest concert hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, dedicated in 1963, which has received architectural acclaim and good acoustical acceptance. But, this was an interesting collaboration. Scharoun decided he wanted to build a hall in which the audience was close to the orchestra, indeed surrounding it. R. S. Lanier writes (Architectural Forum, 120, May 1964) "The seats rise steeply all around in irregularly shaped sections which Scharoun aptly calls 'vineyards ; they are much like row-planted plots of varying shapes and sizes on the sides of a hill. [Scharoun said] it changes the very nature of the audience: the audience becomes less an oppressive mass and more an interestingly varied assembly, both to itself and to the musicians." Cremer was opposed to the acoustically risky solution of deviating from the classical rectangular hall. He even had me meet with him and the architect to help support Cremer's concern over the dangers of such a radical departure into the unknown. However, Scharoun persisted, and Cremer added every feature that he thought would improve the situation - reflecting side surfaces, diffusing irregularities on the ceiling, adjustable low frequency absorbing resonators in case there was bass boom, good reflecting surfaces at the sides and rear of the stage and ten trapezoidal reflectors above the stage, to improve inter-section communication among the musicians.
Erwin Meyer, of the University of Goettingten, Drittes Physics Institute, was a contemporary of Cremer's, who consulted on many architectural projects. He was best known for the research done in his laboratories which was liberally published and has influenced the work of all consultants to this day. The best example of his philosophy of concert hall acoustics is the Beethoven Halle in Bonn, Germany (l 969, 1400 seats). He accepted the architect's design of a curved (segment of a circle) ceiling and he prescribed covering it with a series of 1760 acoustical elements designed to scatter the sound impinging on them but also to absorb sound in the region of 125 Hz to eliminate the effects of sound focusing. Vertically-oriented, cylindrical, sound-diffusers cover most of the side walls and interspersed among them are areas of sound absorption used to give the reverberation times a flat frequency characteristic.
TOWARD THE FUTURE
During the 1950's, I attempted to arrive at a set of guide lines for the acoustical design of halls for music through a study of a large number of concert halls and opera houses in Europe, England and the Western Hemisphere. The results and conclusions drawn from the data, which then could be measured either electronically or from architectural drawings, were published in Music, Acoustics, and Architecture, (Wiley, 1962). That study and the widely discussed problems with London's Royal Festival Hall (l 951) and New York's Philharmonic Hall (1962), led to growing interest in research on halls for music. Today, at least ten acoustical quantities can be measured accurately with modern computer based instrumentation and intensive research is underway to understand the psychoacoustic implications. International conferences, acoustics seminars and frequent meetings of several world-active acoustical societies occur in ever proliferating numbers.
Great laboratories in most of the industrial countries are actively engaged in acoustical research. Recently, I tried to gauge the state of progress in a review paper, L. L. Beranek, "Concert hall acoustics -- 1992," (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 92, 1-39). Michael Barron just published an extensive text including modern data on many concert halls, opera houses and multi-purpose halls [Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design, E & FN Spon and Chapman & Hall, London and New York (l993). This intense international activity promises that acoustical design in the future will combine science and art to permit more accurate prediction of the quality of acoustics in newly completed halls.
This review intentionally omits the world-wide contributions made in the past 30 years by dozens of research and consulting acousticians and psychoacousticians, some of whom are presenting papers during this symposium. I wish to thank them for contributing to my better understanding of this field and for their help in preparation of this paper and my 1992 review paper.
The Sabines at Riverbank John W. Kopec Originally published in 1997
TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Replacing a Scientific Legend
The Colonel's Estate - A Community of Thinkers
Riverbank is Fabyan, or Is It the Other Way Around?
The Right Scientist for the Job
The 1920s The Paul Sabines Get Involved
The 1930s Standardizing Acoustical Laboratory Testing
Acoustics - Some of This, Some of That
Laboratory Versus Field The Dilemmas and Hazards of Acoustical Consulting
The 1940s National Noise Abatement Council, War Research, and a Sabine Retires
Enter Sabine Acoustician Number Three
End Notes
Postscript
Bibliography
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PREFACE
Wallace Clement Sabine (1868-1919) is the father of the science of architecturalacoustics. During his investigations of the acoustical conditions in several Harvard University buildings, Wallace Sabine gained the confidence he needed to consult on the acoustics of the new BostonSymphony Hall being designed by the legendary New York City architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White. This firm was formed in 1878 when Charles Follen McKim formed a partnership with William Rutherford Mead and William B. Bigelow. Bigelow retired the following year when Sanford White joined the firm and the firm's name was established. Largely on the basis of his success at Boston Symphony Hall, Sabine's counsel was sought on a wide range of buildings the New England Conservatory of Music's new building in Boston; the Pulitzer House andCentury Theater in New York City; churches and cathedrals in Los Angeles, Detroit & Boston; and the Rhode Island State capitol building. By 1916, Sabine's list of consulting projects had grownto include the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.; the U.S. Military Academy chapel at West Point; the Halifax Cathedral in Nova Scotia; the Remington Typewriter Company, where he advised on quieting typing clatter; and the Gustavino Company, for whichhe developed and patented a ceramic acoustical tile that found wide application in churches. His consulting files reveal that many of his projects after 1913 also involved noise and noisetelescoping of heating and ventilating equipment sound and vibration. Clearly, Sabine was the foremostauthority on architectural acoustics through most of the first quarter of the twentieth century.
One of Wallace Sabine's consultations around 1913 was with the wealthyindustrialist, financier Colonel George Fabyan. Sabine met him at his estate in Geneva, Illinois, where the Coloneldabbled in various scientific enterprises. Fabyan had heard of Sabine's reputation in physics andacoustics through his brother Marshall, who served as a visiting adviser for the Fabyan Chair at Harvard Medical School. Marshall had retained Sabine to advise him on an acoustic levitation machinethat was not working. During this consultation, Fabyan learned of Sabine's frustration with his inadequate acoustic isolation laboratory at Harvard and offered to build him a suitable one in the quiet prairie country of Illinois at Riverbank estate. Sabine accepted the offer and designed whatwas to become the internationally recognized Riverbank Acoustical Laboratory. He supervised its construction, which was competed just a few months before his untimely death in 1919 at the age of fifty.
Sabine's death left a great void at Riverbank, a void that was to be filled by two otherHarvard physicists named Sabine: Paul Earls Sabine (1879-1958) and Hale Johnson Sabine (1909-1981).In 1919, Colonel Fabyan again turned to Harvard University to find someone to direct the new Riverbank Laboratory and was referred to Paul Sabine, a distant cousin of Wallace. Paul Sabinewas working on a World War I research project in spectroscopy at the time and had had little contact with, or knowledge of, Wallace Sabine's work. Fabyan apparently charmed Paul Sabine intocoming to Riverbank to direct what was then the only laboratory devoted to acoustical research andtesting of acoustical materials and systems. Paul directed Riverbank during the critical formative yearsand for nearly three decades thereafter until his death in 1958. During this period Paul Sabine wasalso involved in founding the Acoustical Society of America and establishing acoustics as a respected and essential subdiscipline of physics Paul's son, Hale, whose physics training at Harvardultimately led him to the profession of acoustics, also became involved in Riverbank during the 1950s and 1960s to round out the leadership of the Sabines at Riverbank.
No one other than John Kopec with the historic perspective, patience, persistence, andinside knowledge of the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratory could have documented this extraordinary history. John's undamped fascination and enthusiasm for the Riverbank history began with his employment as a laboratory assistant there in 1974 and continues today in his current position as manager of the laboratory. He also serves as curator of the Riverbank Museum and of the Architectural Acoustics Archives of the Acoustical Society of America, located at Riverbanksince 1984. About two years after the 1976 discovery of the Wallace Sabine research notebooks, John found Sabine's missing consulting files in a little-used storage room at Riverbank. Hecoauthored with Leo Beranek the article entitled "Wallace C. Sabine, Acoustical Consultant" (Journalof the Acoustical Society of America 69: 1-16, 1981). Without doubt, John Kopec has become theleading scholar on the Sabines at Riverbank.
In this volume, John Kopec masterfully weaves a fascinating story with many intricatedetails. It includes the involvement of an often controversial philanthropist and lover of science andscientific things Colonel George Fabyan; the germination and execution of an idea for a state-of-the-art laboratory specializing in acoustical research and measurements; and the successive leadershipsof three Harvard University-trained physics graduates named Sabine and their contributionsspanning nearly three quarters of the twentieth century, toward the advancement of the profession and discipline of acoustics. Wallace Sabine's life and work has already been documentedthoroughly in William Dana Orcutt's affectionate biography, Wallace Clement Sabine: A Study inAchievement (Plimpton Press, Norwood, Massachusetts, 1933) and in Sabine's Collected Papers onAcoustics (Peninsula Publishing, Los Altos, California, 1994). However, the substantial contributions ofthe two other Sabines to acoustics have, until now, been less well documented.
It is clear from Kopec's history of the Sabines at Riverbank that architecturalacoustics and indeed, the wider field of applied acoustics itself involve a great deal more than merely the acoustics of auditoriums and churches. Even on his first important consulting project, Boston SymphonyHall, Wallace Sabine insisted on more than just the application of his new reverberation equation. He required adequate isolation of the hall's listening chamber from exterior sounds, hence thehall's interior surrounding buffer corridors and other features that protected the hall from exteriortraffic and streetcar noise of the early 1900s and still do today. He also ensured shallow balcony and concert-stage depth to guarantee evenly distributed sound over all the seats and wall niches anddeep ceiling coffers to enhance diffusion of the sound field throughout the concert hall. WallaceSabine's later research focused more and more on unanswered questions of sound distribution and transmission and other unquantified problems in acoustics and noise control, and Paul and Hale Sabine continued his pioneering work. They, too, were deeply involved in the growing public awareness about noise pollution. Indeed, the need for methods and materials for environmentalnoise control became even greater after World War II, especially with the introduction of new andnoisy transportation modes such as jet aircraft. The Sabines' and Riverbank's technical andresearch staff members were all part and parcel of this expanding acoustical activity. We are in JohnKopec's debt for his dedication in telling the story of solid achievement of the Sabines at Riverbank.
William J. Cavanaugh
Fellow, Acoustical Society of America
Sudbury, Massachusetts
June 1994
TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Replacing a Scientific Legend
The Colonel's Estate - A Community of Thinkers
Riverbank is Fabyan, or Is It the Other Way Around?
The Right Scientist for the Job
The 1920s The Paul Sabines Get Involved
The 1930s Standardizing Acoustical Laboratory Testing
Acoustics - Some of This, Some of That
Laboratory Versus Field The Dilemmas and Hazards of Acoustical Consulting
The 1940s National Noise Abatement Council, War Research, and a Sabine Retires
Enter Sabine Acoustician Number Three
End Notes
Postscript
Bibliography
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PREFACE
Wallace Clement Sabine (1868-1919) is the father of the science of architecturalacoustics. During his investigations of the acoustical conditions in several Harvard University buildings, Wallace Sabine gained the confidence he needed to consult on the acoustics of the new BostonSymphony Hall being designed by the legendary New York City architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White. This firm was formed in 1878 when Charles Follen McKim formed a partnership with William Rutherford Mead and William B. Bigelow. Bigelow retired the following year when Sanford White joined the firm and the firm's name was established. Largely on the basis of his success at Boston Symphony Hall, Sabine's counsel was sought on a wide range of buildings the New England Conservatory of Music's new building in Boston; the Pulitzer House andCentury Theater in New York City; churches and cathedrals in Los Angeles, Detroit & Boston; and the Rhode Island State capitol building. By 1916, Sabine's list of consulting projects had grownto include the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.; the U.S. Military Academy chapel at West Point; the Halifax Cathedral in Nova Scotia; the Remington Typewriter Company, where he advised on quieting typing clatter; and the Gustavino Company, for whichhe developed and patented a ceramic acoustical tile that found wide application in churches. His consulting files reveal that many of his projects after 1913 also involved noise and noisetelescoping of heating and ventilating equipment sound and vibration. Clearly, Sabine was the foremostauthority on architectural acoustics through most of the first quarter of the twentieth century.
One of Wallace Sabine's consultations around 1913 was with the wealthyindustrialist, financier Colonel George Fabyan. Sabine met him at his estate in Geneva, Illinois, where the Coloneldabbled in various scientific enterprises. Fabyan had heard of Sabine's reputation in physics andacoustics through his brother Marshall, who served as a visiting adviser for the Fabyan Chair at Harvard Medical School. Marshall had retained Sabine to advise him on an acoustic levitation machinethat was not working. During this consultation, Fabyan learned of Sabine's frustration with his inadequate acoustic isolation laboratory at Harvard and offered to build him a suitable one in the quiet prairie country of Illinois at Riverbank estate. Sabine accepted the offer and designed whatwas to become the internationally recognized Riverbank Acoustical Laboratory. He supervised its construction, which was competed just a few months before his untimely death in 1919 at the age of fifty.
Sabine's death left a great void at Riverbank, a void that was to be filled by two otherHarvard physicists named Sabine: Paul Earls Sabine (1879-1958) and Hale Johnson Sabine (1909-1981).In 1919, Colonel Fabyan again turned to Harvard University to find someone to direct the new Riverbank Laboratory and was referred to Paul Sabine, a distant cousin of Wallace. Paul Sabinewas working on a World War I research project in spectroscopy at the time and had had little contact with, or knowledge of, Wallace Sabine's work. Fabyan apparently charmed Paul Sabine intocoming to Riverbank to direct what was then the only laboratory devoted to acoustical research andtesting of acoustical materials and systems. Paul directed Riverbank during the critical formative yearsand for nearly three decades thereafter until his death in 1958. During this period Paul Sabine wasalso involved in founding the Acoustical Society of America and establishing acoustics as a respected and essential subdiscipline of physics Paul's son, Hale, whose physics training at Harvardultimately led him to the profession of acoustics, also became involved in Riverbank during the 1950s and 1960s to round out the leadership of the Sabines at Riverbank.
No one other than John Kopec with the historic perspective, patience, persistence, andinside knowledge of the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratory could have documented this extraordinary history. John's undamped fascination and enthusiasm for the Riverbank history began with his employment as a laboratory assistant there in 1974 and continues today in his current position as manager of the laboratory. He also serves as curator of the Riverbank Museum and of the Architectural Acoustics Archives of the Acoustical Society of America, located at Riverbanksince 1984. About two years after the 1976 discovery of the Wallace Sabine research notebooks, John found Sabine's missing consulting files in a little-used storage room at Riverbank. Hecoauthored with Leo Beranek the article entitled "Wallace C. Sabine, Acoustical Consultant" (Journalof the Acoustical Society of America 69: 1-16, 1981). Without doubt, John Kopec has become theleading scholar on the Sabines at Riverbank.
In this volume, John Kopec masterfully weaves a fascinating story with many intricatedetails. It includes the involvement of an often controversial philanthropist and lover of science andscientific things Colonel George Fabyan; the germination and execution of an idea for a state-of-the-art laboratory specializing in acoustical research and measurements; and the successive leadershipsof three Harvard University-trained physics graduates named Sabine and their contributionsspanning nearly three quarters of the twentieth century, toward the advancement of the profession and discipline of acoustics. Wallace Sabine's life and work has already been documentedthoroughly in William Dana Orcutt's affectionate biography, Wallace Clement Sabine: A Study inAchievement (Plimpton Press, Norwood, Massachusetts, 1933) and in Sabine's Collected Papers onAcoustics (Peninsula Publishing, Los Altos, California, 1994). However, the substantial contributions ofthe two other Sabines to acoustics have, until now, been less well documented.
It is clear from Kopec's history of the Sabines at Riverbank that architecturalacoustics and indeed, the wider field of applied acoustics itself involve a great deal more than merely the acoustics of auditoriums and churches. Even on his first important consulting project, Boston SymphonyHall, Wallace Sabine insisted on more than just the application of his new reverberation equation. He required adequate isolation of the hall's listening chamber from exterior sounds, hence thehall's interior surrounding buffer corridors and other features that protected the hall from exteriortraffic and streetcar noise of the early 1900s and still do today. He also ensured shallow balcony and concert-stage depth to guarantee evenly distributed sound over all the seats and wall niches anddeep ceiling coffers to enhance diffusion of the sound field throughout the concert hall. WallaceSabine's later research focused more and more on unanswered questions of sound distribution and transmission and other unquantified problems in acoustics and noise control, and Paul and Hale Sabine continued his pioneering work. They, too, were deeply involved in the growing public awareness about noise pollution. Indeed, the need for methods and materials for environmentalnoise control became even greater after World War II, especially with the introduction of new andnoisy transportation modes such as jet aircraft. The Sabines' and Riverbank's technical andresearch staff members were all part and parcel of this expanding acoustical activity. We are in JohnKopec's debt for his dedication in telling the story of solid achievement of the Sabines at Riverbank.
William J. Cavanaugh
Fellow, Acoustical Society of America
Sudbury, Massachusetts
June 1994