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MillimeterJourney through acoustics
Dec 1, 1997 12:00 PM, Ted Uzzle
John W. Kopec, The Sabines of Riverbank, Their Role in the Science of Architectural Acoustics, Acoustical Society of America, 1997, xvi + 212, cloth.
It's like a yarn from Jules Verne.
A diletante with vast inherited wealth (well husbanded and enlarged) creates an estate along the Fox River near Geneva, IL. He falls under the spell of a believer that Francis Bacon wrote the works we attribute to Shakespeare. She believes the plays and sonnets are filled with coded messages that prove Bacon's authorship and reveal his startling, but heretofore hidden, achievements in alchemy. The wealthy diletante hires a staff of codebreakers to assist the effort, and this staff is later hired by the military to break enemy codes in the Great War of 1914-1918.
One discovery revealed by the code, previously known only to the Rosicrucians, is an acoustical levitating machine. A huge drum with piano strings stretched along its surface is rotated within an outer casing with corresponding strings. As the strings vibrate, the outer shell is made to levitate. So goes the theory; trouble is, it doesn't work. The diletante uses the occasion of a large family gift to a great university to invite a famous professor to his estate to study the problem. The professor takes one look, makes a few calculations, and convinces the diletante there will never be enough sound energy to lift anything. Might the old gentleman be interested in underwriting some genuine scientific research?
So began a decades-long voyage of discovery: The wonders recorded included sound absorbers that seemed to absorb more sound than fell upon them; an acoustical consultant, never hired for a certain concert hall project, who was criticized for its poor acoustics (while another acoustical consultant was praised for the excellent acoustics of the very same hall); the standard color of sound used in an acoustical laboratory; the required height, weight and shoes for a lady floor-walker; and much, much more, equally exotic.
Our Captain Nemo was of course Colonel George Fabyan. Professor Aronnax was played by Professor Wallace Clement Sabine (and after his death by his cousin Paul Sabine, and even later by Paul Sabine's son Hale Sabine). Ned Land appears in this story, his real name Jack Wilhemson, a Norwegian sailor in charge of the Colonel's fleet of boats and canoes on the Fox River. There's even a giant squid, the manufacturers of acoustical materials, who want their products tested in common in a standard way, but with enough individual exceptions to make the measurements incomparable. Instead of aboard the submarine Nautilus, these events took place at Riverbank, now part of Geneva, IL. And it all really happened.
It is hard to imagine a more colorful character than George Fabyan. Certainly Verne never created one. Born into a wealthy family of Boston cotton merchants, he ran away at 16 and drifted around the midwest. At 26 he took a job under an assumed name at the Fabyan cotton warehouse in Chicago. Found out when his father visited the place, he was put in charge, and began buying land around Geneva township, eventually amassing 600 acres (2.4 kilometer squared).
Eventually devoting his full time to activities at his estate, called Riverbank, he was an imposing figure, lordly of manner and with a cigar constantly lit. He affected a white sweater, white trousers, white shoes and a blue blazer (except when he wore jodhpurs and knee-high riding boots). He bred cattle, developed hybrid strains of various crops (everyone at Riverbank ate bread from a new hybrid flour ground in the windmill on the estate), conducted weapons research in trenches and battlements (for which the governor of Illinois made him an honorary colonel, a title perfectly suited to his appalling vanity), supported cryptological analysis of the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, hosted such visitors as Albert Einstein, Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, P.T. Barnum (oh, to have overheard that conversation), and, famously, Wallace Clement Sabine. This menagerie of visitors was no more exotic than the animals and birds the Colonel collected. Did I mention Frank Lloyd Wright designed the main house at Riverbank? There was a Japanese garden squirreled away somewhere.
The catalog of astonishing phantasms could go on forever. Shall I tell you one more? Colonel Fabyan tried to close the segment of the navigable Fox River where it wound through his estate. The State of Illinois declined to repeal riparian law, even for the Colonel, so he constructed a lighthouse at the shore that flashed twice, then three times, then twice, then three times, and so on. Think of this as the Colonel elevating a finger toward those navigating his stretch of the river, and calling out, "23 skidoo!"
In 1913 Wallace Sabine was just beginning to return to his work on acoustics. He had spent the decade ending in 1904 in a punishing routine of teaching all day and conducting reverberation measurements all night, hundreds and hundreds per night. The opening of Symphony Hall in Boston should have been the crowning achievement of these arduous 10 years, but when it opened its acoustics received mixed, and generally negative, reviews. At a much more technical level, the reverberation time Sabine measured in the finished hall was somewhat shorter than he had predicted. Sabine began to let his acoustical researches slow down, and he busied himself with the minutia of his new deanship at Harvard. A decade after this an acoustical-materials manufacturing firm attempted to patent Sabine's reverberation formula, and he was tempted to return to acoustics.
Did Sabine have to be persuaded to visit Colonel Fabyan in 1913 and fix up his anti-gravity machine? Perhaps, but by 1915 Fabyan had invited Sabine to design a purpose-built acoustical laboratory on the Riverbank estate and be its director. The plans arrived at Riverbank in 1916, but the acoustical laboratory was not built until 1918. By then both Fabyan and Sabine were working full-time on war research. Sabine would be made a colonel in the American, British, French and Italian armies (rather trumping Colonel Fabyan's Illinois colonelship), but he would also neglect his cancer, contract influenza, and die less than two months after the armistice.
Here was Colonel Fabyan, with the world's first, and only, acoustical laboratory, and no one to run it. Hastily contacting relatives back in Boston, he learned of Paul Earls Sabine, a cousin of Wallace's, but rather younger. Paul Sabine had just taken a Ph.D. from Harvard and conducted war work, and planned to take up a post at what was then the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland. Could a deal be struck? A month after Wallace Sabine died, Paul Sabine was ringing the doorbell at the Wallace Clement Sabine Laboratory of Acoustics at Riverbank.
In the entranceway to the laboratory office was a bell with a pull-wire hanging from underneath it. On the wall next to the bell was a sign, "Ring bell for service." Anyone unfortunate enough to pull the wire discovered the bell would drop and dangle and bang against the wall, raising the most astonishing clatter that went on forever. If that didn't frighten away the visitor, a secretary would appear and direct visitors to the Colonel "in the rear office." Going through a door, the visitor found himself in an empty room with three further doors, one leading to a staircase and the others to closets. In the back of one closet was a vault door, and the most courageous visitors, opening the vault door, would find the Colonel inside, sitting at a desk too large to have come in through the door. In fact, the walls were built around the desk. Thus would the Colonel set the stage for his discovery by visitors. Paul Sabine must have thought himself in a madhouse.
Colonel Fabyan pretended the great crash of 1929 didn't happen, but was still obliged to reduce the staff at Riverbank and ask Paul Sabine to find ways to make the acoustical laboratories pay for themselves. This task he accepted with alacrity, and Paul Sabine turned a research institution into the model on which acoustical testing laboratories would follow to this day. Manufacturers were invited to send samples of materials or equipment for more sophisticated tests than they were able to do themselves. Also, Riverbank Labs offered independent testing backed by a reputation for honesty. Paul Sabine was instrumental in setting up a trade association of manufacturers of acoustical materials, as well as the Acoustical Society of America, of which he was on the first slate of elected officers. Paul Sabine was a pioneer in the development and use of electronic instruments for acoustical measurements (when he arrived in February 1919 the laboratory had nothing but stopwatches, tuning forks and organ pipes). Wallace Sabine may have turned architectural acoustics into a science, but Paul Sabine turned it into an industry.
In 1936 the Colonel died, and his widow died a few years later. Paul Sabine retired from the laboratories in 1947. Except for the semiconductor and the computer, architectural acoustics was as we know it today. Almost immediately the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories would begin major changes, however. Its operation was taken over by the Armour Institute of Technology's Armour Research Foundation, which eventually became the ITT Research Institute of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
After 26 years at the Celotex Corporation, Hale Sabine, Paul Sabine's son and the third of the Harvard-educated Sabine acousticians, accepted a position at the Armour Research Foundation, and this brought him back to Riverbank in 1957, leaving in 1961 to manage the Owens-Corning acoustical laboratory.
In 1976 a Riverbank employee named John Kopec discovered Wallace Clement Sabine's research notebooks, and two years later found his files on consulting projects. Kopec decided to assemble a history of Riverbank and of the Sabines, securing the assistance of Hale Sabine, the last living Riverbank Sabine. After 20 years of arduous and serendipitous research, the Acoustical Society has published his book The Sabines at Riverbank, as satisfying a human story as a reader could hope for. This is the best kind of history, the kind concerned less with reviewing outcomes than understanding processes. Although it may be true that some industries and sciences are created by great, impersonal forces, much of the appeal of acoustics is its individualistic, picaresque history, characters larger than life engaged obsessively in enterprises cautious people wouldn't touch. Even if you know or care nothing of architectural acoustics, this obviously true story, too fantastic for fiction, is impossible to put down. For information about buying this book, circle (@@@) on the Rapid Facts card.
