Common Science Part 24

When you talk into a dictaphone horn, the vibrating air causes the needle at the small end of the horn to vibrate so that it traces a wavy line in the soft wax of the cylinder as the cylinder turns. Then when you run the needle over the line again it follows the identical track made when you talked into the horn, and it vibrates back and forth just as at first; this makes the air in the horn vibrate exactly as when you talked into the horn, and you have the same sound.

All this goes back to the fundamental principle that sound is vibrations of air; different kinds of sounds are simply different kinds of vibrations. The next experiments will prove this.

EXPERIMENT 54. Turn the rotator rapidly, holding the corner of a piece of stiff paper against the holes in the disk. As you turn faster, does the sound become higher or lower? Keep turning at a steady rate and move your paper from the inner row of holes to the outer row and back again. Which row has the most holes in it? Which makes the highest sound? Hold your paper against the teeth at the edge of the disk. Is the pitch higher or lower than before? Blow through a blowpipe against the different rows of holes while the disk is being whirled.

As the holes make the air vibrate do you get any sound?

This experiment shows that by making the air vibrate you get a sound.

The next experiment will show that when you have sound you are getting vibrations.

EXPERIMENT 55. Tap a tuning fork against the desk, then hold the p.r.o.ngs lightly against your lips. Can you feel them vibrate? Tap it again, and hold the fork close to your ear.

Can you hear the sound?

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 96. An interesting experiment in sound.]

The experiment which follows will show that we usually must have air to do the vibrating to carry the sound.

EXPERIMENT 56. Make a pad of not less than a dozen thicknesses of soft cloth so that you can stand an alarm clock on it on the plate of the air pump. The pad is to keep the vibrations of the alarm from making the plate vibrate. A still better way would be to set a tripod on the plate of the air pump and to suspend the alarm clock from the tripod by a rubber band. Set the alarm so that it will ring in 3 or 4 minutes, put it under the bell jar, and pump out the air. Before the alarm goes off, be sure that the air is almost completely pumped out of the jar. Can you hear the bell ring? Distinguish between a dull trilling sound caused by the jarring of the air pump when the alarm is on, and the actual _ringing_ sound of the bell.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 97. When the air is pumped out of the jar, you cannot hear the bell ring.]

The experiment just completed shows how we know there would be no sound on the moon, since there is practically no air around it. The next experiment will show you more about the way in which phonographs work.

EXPERIMENT 57. Put a blank cylinder on the dictaphone, adjust the recording (cutting) needle and diaphragm at the end of the tube, start the motor, and talk into the dictaphone. Shut off the motor, remove the cutting needle, and put on the reproducing needle (the cutting needle, being sharp, would spoil the cylinder). Start the reproducing needle where the recording needle started, turn on the motor, and listen to your own voice.

Notice that in the dictaphone the air waves of your voice are all concentrated into a small s.p.a.ce as they go down the tube. At the end of the tube is a diaphragm, a flat disk which is elastic and vibrates back and forth very easily. The air waves from your voice would not vibrate the needle itself enough to make any record; but they vibrate the diaphragm, and the needle, being fastened rigidly to it, vibrates with it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 98. Making a phonograph record on an old-fashioned phonograph.]

In the same way, when the reproducing needle vibrates as it goes over the track made by the cutting needle, it would make air vibrations too slight for you to hear if it were not fastened to the diaphragm. When the diaphragm vibrates with the needle, it makes a much larger surface of air vibrate than the needle alone could. Then the tube, like an ear trumpet, throws all the air vibrations in one direction, so that you hear the sound easily.

EXPERIMENT 58. Put a clean white sheet of paper around the recording drum, pasting the two ends together to hold it in place. Put a small piece of gum camphor on a dish just under the paper, light it, and turn the drum so that all parts will be evenly smoked. Be sure to turn it rapidly enough to keep the paper from being burned.

Melt a piece of gla.s.s over a burner and draw it out into a thread. Break off about 8 inches of this gla.s.s thread and tie it firmly with cotton thread to the edge of one p.r.o.ng of a tuning fork. Clamp the top of the tuning fork firmly above the smoked drum, adjusting it so that the point of the gla.s.s thread rests on the smoked paper. Turn the handle slightly to see if the gla.s.s is making a mark. If it is not, adjust it so that it will. Now let some one turn the cylinder quickly and steadily. While it is turning, tap the tuning fork on the p.r.o.ng which has _not_ the gla.s.s thread fastened to it. The gla.s.s point should trace a white, wavy line through the smoke on the paper. If it does not, keep on trying, adjusting the apparatus until the point makes a wavy line.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 99. A modern dictaphone.]

Making a record in this way is, on a large scale, almost exactly like the making of a phonograph record. The smoked paper on which a tracing can easily be made as it turns is like the soft wax cylinder. The gla.s.s needle is like the recording needle of a phonograph. The chief difference is that you have struck the tuning fork to make it and the needle vibrate, instead of making it vibrate by air waves set in motion by your talking. It is because these vibrations of the tuning fork are more powerful and larger than are those of the recording needle of a phonograph that you can see the record on the recording drum, while you cannot see it clearly on the phonograph cylinder.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 100. How the apparatus is set up.]

In all ordinary circ.u.mstances, sound is the vibration of _air_. But in swimming we can hear with our ears under water, and fishes hear without any air. So, to be accurate, we should say that sound is vibrations of any kind of matter. And the vibrations travel better in most other kinds of matter than they do in air. Vibrations move rather slowly in air, compared with the speed at which they travel in other substances. It takes sound about 5 seconds to go a mile in air; in other words, it would go 12 miles while an express train went one.

But it travels faster in water and still faster in anything hard like steel. That is why you can hear the noise of an approaching train better if you put your ear to the rail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 101. When the tuning fork vibrates, the gla.s.s needle makes a wavy line on the smoked paper on the drum.]

WHY WE SEE STEAM RISE BEFORE WE HEAR A WHISTLE BLOW. But even through steel, sound does not travel with anything like the speed of light.

In the time that it takes sound to go a mile, light goes hundreds of thousands of miles, easily coming all the way from the moon to the earth. That is why we see the steam rise from the whistle of a train or a boat before we hear the sound. The sound and the light start together; but the light that shows us the steam is in our eyes almost at the instant when the steam leaves the whistle; the sound lags behind, and we hear it later.

_APPLICATION 42._ Explain why a bell rung in a vacuum makes no noise; why the clicking of two stones under water sounds louder if your head is under water, than the clicking of the two stones in the air sounds if your head is in the air; why you hear a buzzing sound when a bee or a fly comes near you; how a phonograph can reproduce sounds.

INFERENCE EXERCISE

Explain the following:

251. The paint on woodwork blisters when hot.

252. You can screw a nut on a bolt very much tighter with a wrench than with your fingers.

253. When a pipe is being repaired in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a house, you can hear a sc.r.a.ping noise in the faucets upstairs.

254. Sunsets are unusually red after volcanic eruptions.

255. Thunder shakes a house.

256. Shooting stars are really stones flying through s.p.a.ce.

When they come near the earth, it pulls them swiftly down through the air. Explain why they glow.

257. At night it is difficult to see out through a closed window of a room in which a lamp is lighted.

258. When there is a breeze you cannot see clear reflections in a lake.

259. Rubbing with coa.r.s.e sandpaper makes rough wood smooth.

260. A bow is bent backward to make the arrow go forward.

SECTION 29. _Echoes._

When you put a sea sh.e.l.l to your ear, how is it that you hear a roar in the sh.e.l.l?

Why can you sometimes hear an echo and sometimes not?

If it were not for the fact that sound travels rather slowly, we should have no echoes, for the sound would get back to us practically at the instant we made it. An echo is merely a sound, a series of air vibrations, bounced back to us by something at a distance. It takes time for the vibration which we start to reach the wall or cliff that bounces it back, and it takes as much more time for the returning vibration to reach our ears. So you have plenty of time to finish your shout before the sound bounces back again. The next experiment shows pretty well how the waves, or vibrations, of sound are reflected; only in the experiment we use waves of water because they go more slowly and we can watch them.

EXPERIMENT 59. Fill the long laboratory sink (or the bathtub at home) half full of water and start a wave from one end.

Watch it move along the side of the sink. Notice what happens when it reaches the other end.

Air waves do the same thing; when they strike against a flat surface, they bounce back like a rubber ball. If you are far enough away from a flat wall or cliff, and shout, the sound (the air vibrations you start) is reflected back to you and you hear the echo. But if you are close to the walls, as in an empty room, the sound _reverberates_; it bounces back and forth from one wall to the other so rapidly that no distinct echo is heard, and there is merely a confusion of sound.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 102. When the wave reaches the end of the sink, it is reflected back. Sound waves are reflected in the same way.]

When you drop a pebble in water, the ripples spread in all directions.

In the same way, when you make a sound in the open air, the air waves spread in all directions. But when you shout through a megaphone the air waves are all concentrated in one direction and consequently they are much stronger in that direction. However, while the megaphone intensifies sound, the echoing from the sides of the megaphone makes the sound lose some of its distinctness.

WHY IT IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND A SPEAKER IN AN EMPTY HALL. A speaker can be heard much more easily in a room full of people than in an empty hall. The sound does not reflect well from the soft clothes of the audience and the uneven surfaces of their bodies, just as a rubber ball does not bounce well in sand. So the sound does not reverberate as in an empty hall.