12 WALLACE CLEMENT WARE SABINE— HALL 1MeM0IRS [y^!xxi; 



The words just quoted are found in a paper printed in 1914. We may say that, so far as 

 the properties of auditoriums are concerned, Sabine had, in less than 20 years, brought archi- 

 tectural acoustics from the empirical state, in which success with any new structure was a happy 

 accident and failure was a misfortune often made ridiculous by such attempted remedies as 

 the stringing of wires, to the status of a reasoned science and a precise art. 



He had done this by force of his own qualities, with but little favor of circumstances and 

 with so little financial assistance or reward that he was probably a poorer man by thousands of 

 dollars than he would have been had he never attempted it. Moreover, he had published his 

 formulas and his devices freely 12 to the world, for anyone to use who could, patenting only, and 

 this with Mr. Guastavino, the kind of tile described above. 



But one great practical difficulty in acoustics remained, the nature of which is shown in the 

 following passage quoted from a paper of Sabine's printed in 1915: 



The insulation of sound as an unsolved problem in architectural acoustics was first brought to the writer's 

 attention by the New England Conservatory of Music, immediately after its completion in 1904, and almost 

 simultaneously in connection with a private house which had just been completed in New York. A few years 

 later it was renewed by the Institute of Musical Art in New York. In the construction of all three buildings it 

 had been regarded as particularly important that communication of sound from room to room should be avoided, 

 and methods to that end had been employed which were in every way reasonable. The results showed that in 

 this phase of architectural acoustics also there had not been a sufficiently searching and practical investigation 

 and that there were no experimental data on which an architect could rely. 



In some respects the attempts of well-known architects at sound insulation had been weirdly 

 unsuccessful. Thus, concerning the private house mentioned above, we have the following 

 particulars : 



It was practically a double house, one of the most imperative conditions of the building being the exclusion 

 of sounds in the main part of the house from the part to the left of a great partition wall. In the basement of 

 the main dwelling was the servants' dining room. Rapping with the knuckles on the wall of this room produced 

 in the bedroom, two stories up and on the other side of the great partition wall, a sound which, although hardly, 

 as the architect expressed it, magnified, [was] yet of astonishing loudness and clearness. 



Sabine's analysis of the sound insulation problem, perhaps the most difficult that he encoun- 

 tered in acoustics, is well shown in the following paragraph, which, though not put in quotation 

 marks, is made up almost entirely of parts to be found in his paper: 



The transmission of sound from one room to another involves three steps — the taking up 

 of the vibration from the air by the solid partition, its transmission through the partition, and 

 its communication to the air of the receiving room. In the case of a solid masonry wall, the 

 transmission from surface to surface is almost perfect; but, because of the great mass and rigidity 

 of the wall, it takes up but little of the vibration of the incident sound. In the case of multiple 

 screen walls, the communication from wall to wall, through the intermediate air space or around 

 the edges, is poor compared with the face to face communication of a solid wall. But the 

 vibration of the screen wall exposed to the sound, the initial step in the process of transmission, 

 is greatly enhanced by its light and flexible character. Similarly its counterpart, the screen 

 wall wliich by its vibration communicates the sound to the receiving room, is light, flexible, and 

 responsive to relatively small forces. This responsiveness of the screens may compensate or 

 more than compensate for the poor communication between them. 



In his studies of sound insulation Sabine used layers of felt, then sheet-iron partitions with 

 air spaces between, then such partitions with layers of felt and of air between. With the last 

 combination, made about 6 inches thick in all, sound of 1,000,000 times minimum audibility 



u At least one individual thought Sabine was neglecting a golden opportunity. In 1909 a certain young architect, , who had dealt success- 

 fully, by means of Sabine*s formulas and methods, with the acoustic troubles of a certain synagogue and had received a good round sum for his 



work, visited him, asked him many technical questions, and tried to get a monopoly of his advice for a company proposed to form. Sabine 



declining this proposition, then undertook to patent, as his own, all of Sabine's formulas and methods. The first intimation to Sabine of this 



maneuver came in a letter from Mr. Mead, of McKim, Mead & White, saying that had served an injunction on his firm to restrain it from 



using suggestions made by Sabine for improvement of the acoustic qualities of the lecture room of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts. Fortu- 

 nately had been a little too enterprising, for though, strangely enough, his claims had been allowed, the patents had not yet been issued. 



Prompt and vigorous action, in which Mr. Frederick P. Fish, one or two United States Senators, and, I believe, President Taft, had a part, checked 



Mr. at the Patent Office. In the subsequent legal proceedings testimony of the most positive character was given, showing that Sabine had, 



previous to 1908, prescribed alterations for improvement of the acoustic properties of seven auditoriums and that in all of these the changes made 

 had been proved successful by years of experience. No evidence was offered by , and his application for patents was finally rejected. 



