Abstract

Summary The resonator and the tuning fork were major instruments in acoustics in the latter half of the nineteenth-century. In particular, the third Baron Rayleigh made extensive use of these instruments throughout his long career as an experimentalist. These instruments underwent a number of alterations during their use as central experimental tools in acoustics. Functional and structural alterations were introduced in the adaptation of these instruments to several major acousticians’ experimental settings. Rayleigh not only adopted the two instruments as objects of mathematical and experimental investigation but also employed them ingeniously for various purposes. His continuing creation of a variety of uses and forms of these instruments contributed to focusing acoustics on pure tones and musical sounds until the early twentieth century.