The theory of sound

The year 1877 was a remarkable year. Alexander Graham Bell installs the world's first commercial telephone service. The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club begins its first lawn tennis tournament at Wimbledon and Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record sound, considered Edison's first great invention. Also in this year Charles Rolls the co-founder of the Rolls-Royce and Louis Renault, founder of Renault were born. But 1877 was also the year that Lord Rayleigh published his book "The theory of sound".

Lord Rayleigh

Lord Rayleigh, in full John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh of Terling Place was born November 12th, 1842 in Langford Grove, England. After his father's death in 1873 he inherited and received the title of Lord Rayleigh. He studied Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry at Cambridge University. In 1879 he was appointed professor at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and 1887 he became director of the Davy-Faraday Research Laboratory at the Royal Institution in London.

Why the sky turns blue

Lord Rayleigh made fundamental discoveries in the fields of sound, optics and spectroscopy that are basic to the theory of wave propagation in fluids. He is mostly known for his successful isolation of argon. For this discovery he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904. His later researches were more on the field of physics like, colour vision, electrodynamics, electromagnetism and light scattering. With this knowledge he could explained why an unclouded sky turns blue. But he also had a great interest in sound, wave theory and vibrations which resulted in the publication of the book "The theory of sound".

Sui Generis

In this book he examined: sound propagations, compositions of harmonic motions, vibration of plates, tension of a membrane and for a big part on the law of extension of a string like from a violin.

I very much like how Lord Rayleigh is describing sound in the very first sentence of his introduction: "The sensation of sound is a thing sui generis. Not comparable with any other sensations".

Sui Generis: Latin: [?s?.i? ?ɡ?n?r?s]) is a Latin phrase that means "of its (his/her/their) own kind, in a class by itself", therefore "unique".

The first volume of the book appeared 143 years ago. The second followed in 1878 which is concentrating on acoustical propagation in material media. The books had many reprints after his death and has remained the foremost monument of acoustical literature. During his life Lord Rayleigh was very dedicated to science. He even worked on scientific papers until five days before his death at the age of 76.

If you are interested you can read the full book when clicking on the link below.

reference: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1904/strutt/biographical/