Making Waves
Innovations in the Science of Sound
Here you'll find some of our star objects in the collection, some personal favourites and interesting facts about the people involved.
This siren was made by the French scientist and physicist Charles Cagnaird de la Tour (1777-1859).
It is made of brass and consists of two metal disks, each one perforated with equally spaced holes. When air is forced into the siren, the disks begin to rotate, owing to the slanted bore of the holes. As they rotate, the flow of air is periodically cut off and reinstated, which causes a regular emission of puffs of air.
De la Tour's siren was incredibly accurate, due to the inclusion of an upper disk drive mechanism, which counted how many revolutions per second were produced by the siren; this made his siren a key scientific tool, as it allowed the frequency of a sound to be precisely calculated.​​
The humble tuning fork has turned into a key aspect of our exhibition.
The tuning fork at its' simplest has made it onto our star object list for being the inspiration for a huge range of the instruments in our collection.
Though some have added sirens or resonance boxes, though they have been made big or small and out of all manner of materials, the tuning fork was, and still is, a key tool in understanding acoustics and the physics of sound.