Summary Between the 1860s and the 1910s, British acoustics was transformed from an area of empirical research into a mathematically organized field. Musical motives—improving musical scales and temperaments, making better musical instruments, and understanding the nature of musical tones—were among the major driving forces of acoustical researchers in nineteenth-century Britain. The German acoustician, Helmholtz, had a major impact on British acousticians who also had extensive interactions with American and French acousticians. Rayleigh's acoustics, reflecting all these features, bore remarkable fruit in (...) his treatise The Theory of Sound, which successfully subjected empirical acoustics to analytical mathematics. His accomplishments made British acoustics a subfield of physics, thus distinguishing it from the ‘new acoustics’ in early twentieth-century America. (shrink)

Summary Througout the nineteenth century, acoustics or the science of sound in America lagged behind European acoustics which had been rapidly advancing. During this period, the American physicist Alfred M. Mayer made original contributions to acoustics and earned a reputation in Europe, filling a gap in late nineteenth-century American research in acoustics. Lacking fellowship with American acousticians, he was affiliated with the European community of research in acoustics in various respects such as taking up themes of research, employing experimental instruments, (...) learning the practice of research, and adopting specific theories for research. In addition, he tried to naturalise acoustics on American soil by applying expertise to practical problems and creating specialised experimental setups for acoustics education in America. But his research was not taken advantage of by the next generation of American acousticians, who focused on practical technologies such as telephony, the control of noise, and underwater acoustics. (shrink)

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. (shrink)