A lecture on the progress of physical science since the opening of the London Institution / by W.R. Grove.

  • Grove, W. R. (William Robert), 1811-1896.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A lecture on the progress of physical science since the opening of the London Institution / by W.R. Grove. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    one foot by three inches : they are adapted to our denomi- nation of money, and must form most useful adjuncts to the merchant’s counting-house. In my list of Sciences I have not included Acoustics, as this science is so immediately resolvable into Mechanics; all the effects of sound, except those more mysterious ones which take place between the exterior organ of hearing and the sensorium,—having been demonstratively traced to Mo- tion. In this branch of Mechanics much also has been done, and here the name of Savart stands pre-eminent. I M'ould willingly give you a resum6 of his labours, the more so as he now lives but in the minds of those who have studied them ; but if Sir John Herschel expresses his inability to condense them into twenty close-printed folios, I need say little to make you understand how briefly I must slur them over. Savart has most perseveringly devoted himself to the study of Sonorous Vibrations, and the communication of them from one body to another. Poisson established a law which gave the relation of notes produced by the transverse and longitudinal vibrations of a rod; Savart found that if tu'o rods be made to touch each other perpendicularly, the longi- tudinal vibration of the one occasions transverse vibration in the other, and conversely. He further generalised this, and proved that alternations of chords with laminae, or even of solids with liquids and gases, arc affected by longitudinal or transverse vibratioy, according as their position is parallel or perpendicular to the direction of the initial motion, that if one set be made to vibrate longitudinally, those at right angles to them will suffer transverse vibration, so that the actual direction of all communicated vibration is alw’ays parallel. Another proposition of Savart’s is, that the notion of the definite nature of sounds produced by the vibration of the same cord or rod is inaccurate, and that the sounds produced by these may be made to pass one into another by imperceptible gradations. Savart has moreover experimentally traced the forms of the nodal surfaces which divide vibrating masses of air, that is, the surfaces which are at rest while isochronous vibrations take place on either side, and which I may rudely