A Bit of History
Fabien Anselmet, Pierre‐Olivier Mattei · 2016
This chapter talks about the history of acoustics. Conventionally, acoustics is split into three parts: the production of sound, its propagation and reception. The chapter presents a brief historical primer, focusing particularly on the period which witnessed the birth of the basic concepts, between the 16th and 19th Century. The pioneer of experimentation on the connection between the frequency of the sound and the way the string is plucked was Sauveur, who incidentally suggested the term acoustics for the science of sounds. The chapter concludes by mentioning aeroacoustics, a very recent science that has gained momentum only with the pioneering works of Sir James Lighthill in the 1950s. From the middle of the 19th Century, acoustics has undergone considerable development and here it is impossible to continue our history of acoustics which would otherwise take us in too many different directions.