MadSci Network: Science History
Query:

Re: Could ancient sounds be trapped in pottery?

Date: Tue Sep 7 18:36:12 1999
Posted By: Steve Czarnecki, senior technical staff member, Lockheed Martin
Area of science: Science History
ID: 936398464.Sh
Message:

Hee-hee! I'd forgotten about this...

A dozen or so years ago, a colleague gave me copies of some articles titled "The Inventions of Daedalus", published as a recurring comic-relief column in a serious scientific magazine [see below - Moderator]. Collections of these articles are published as "The Inventions of Daedalus" and "The Further Inventions of Daedalus". Your local bookstore may have these, or they can be ordered from an on-line bookstore (I just checked with one of the biggies).

Daedalus was the inventor of Greek legend who built wings of wax and feathers for himself and son, Icarus, so that they might fly as birds. Unfortunately, Icarus flew too high and near the sun, which melted his wings, causing to crash fatally to the ground.

The Daedalus of this column would, on a regular basis, propose various schemes of tantalizing plausibility. One such scheme was based on the observation that Italian plaster masons probably sang as they smoothed out the plaster in the various frescoes of the Rennaisance. Their trowels would have acted as sounding boards, turning the acoustical vibrations in the air into ripples permanently cast into the plaster. All one needed to do, therefore, to recreate the sound of 16th century plaster masons singing the opera of the day, is to run a phonograph stylus across the surface of the plaster in the proper directions and amplify the the resulting signals through a phone amplifier and loudspeaker.

This is similar to your pottery wheel question.

I did a quick Altavista search, and much to my surprise, found this reference: to such a scheme attributed to Daedalus . The article is in Russian, but the graphic shows exactly what you're talking about.

Alas, like all of Daedalus's schemes, they work on paper, but fall short in practice. The problem is one of signal-to-noise. In principle, the plaster mason's trowel or the potter's stylus indeed scribes microscopic variations into the medium. Unfortunately, these effects are overwhelmed by the granularity of the media, and other extraneous vibrations (motion of the artisan's hand and fingers, for example). There are other practical problems, such as what guarantee is there the individual tracks were laid down, and how would one reconstruct the original path of the tool?

The bottom line is that you've stumbled across an erudite urban legend, and hopefully haven't found yourself on the wrong end of a bar bet!

Steve Czarnecki

If you can find them, the "Inventions of Daedalus" make for a fun read. Some of his schemes include a very democratic city bus that operates without a driver; instead, all passengers are given a steering wheel, accelerator, and brake pedal to "vote" on where the bus should go. A computer on board the bus arbitrates the inputs from the passengers to give a net steering command to the bus's wheels. The idea is that 50 sets of eyes on the road are better than 1 set, and why not let the bus go where most of the passengers want to go. Refinements to the concept include allowing passenger to pay variable amounts of money according to how strongly they want to get somewhere; passengers who pay more would get a stronger voice in the vote than passengers who pay little or nothing!

Moderator's note:
The Daedelus column appears every week in Nature. While The Inventions of Daedelus is out-of-print, The Further Inventions of Daedelus is scheduled to be published in November.


Current Queue | Current Queue for Science History | Science History archives

Try the links in the MadSci Library for more information on Science History.



MadSci Home | Information | Search | Random Knowledge Generator | MadSci Archives | Mad Library | MAD Labs | MAD FAQs | Ask a ? | Join Us! | Help Support MadSci


MadSci Network, webadmin@www.madsci.org
© 1995-1999. All rights reserved.