30 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



keynote of the new motto of the British Association ' Bed omnia dis- 

 posuisti ' (But Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and 

 weight.) Rayleigh was almost alone in his day in improvising with rare 

 simplicity and skill measuring devices in acoustics. But in many ways 

 his voice was one crying in the wilderness, for until the telephone came 

 into general use, acoustics had been of little service to the people, and 

 there was small interest in the subject at either schools or Universities. 

 Many of us will recall the shabby treatment meted out to sound in the 

 physics curricula of those days. 



The touchstone came with the thermionic valve, which led to electrical 

 methods of measurement and so to higher precision, as elsewhere in 

 physics. The gramophone, wireless, broadcasting and the talking 

 pictures followed each other in succession ; and now acoustics, far from 

 being a Cinderella, has become a radiant Princess of physics in whose 

 career the public interest has become completely enchained. Her ' open 

 sesame ' revealed the interior of the Abbey last May to countless millions, 

 who were vouchsafed a vivid acoustic imagery of the Coronation cere- 

 mony. For such technical miracles, no praise can be too high for the 

 skilled army of technical and industrial workers who see to it that 

 developments in invention, equipment and technique follow each other 

 like a river in spate. The literature is immense, and I can only surmise 

 that the commercial value of applied acoustics must run into many 

 millions of pounds. At any rate, I can testify, as its Chairman, that a 

 Committee of the British Standards Institution was occupied for nearly 

 two years in the careful scrutiny and compilation of a glossary of the 

 large and steadily expanding acoustical terminology. So much acoustical 

 research is now being carried out, that an authoritative glossary, par- 

 ticularly in the matter of units, is manifestly of the first importance in 

 the comparison of experimental results from different laboratories and 

 the application of such data to engineering acoustics. Sound has become 

 a marketable commodity the cultural and political developments of which, 

 particularly in regard to broadcasting, are not easy to envisage. 



Noise and the Nation. 



Simultaneously with these developments in applied acoustics, there 

 has gradually developed in this country a public consciousness of the 

 insidious growth of the social evil of needless noise — a pernicious by- 

 product attributable in great part to an increasingly mechanised civilisa- 

 tion. With this growing realisation, the nation is beginning to demand 

 and to receive protection against the nuisance of outrageous noise whether 

 generated by private or public bodies. It is looking for ways and means 

 of mitigating excessive transport noises particularly on the road and in 

 the air, and it is seeking to know why in modern houses or flats it should 

 not be accorded adequate privacy against the natural though sometimes 

 unreasonable noises of neighbours. 



All this is not to say that John Citizen cherishes the ideal of a completely 

 silent world, for due noise in due season unquestionably contributes to 

 the spice of life. It should indeed be emphasised that in this matter he 



