ReMaking History, Volume 2

Chapter 2 John Shore Invents the Tuning Fork

The science of acoustics is an ancient one, and historians of science trace its origin to the ancient Greek island of Samos, the pinnacle of classical antiquity’s Ionian culture. It’s there that the scientific principles for acoustics and sound were first discovered. That’s not to say it’s where the first musical instruments were built, for music goes back into Paleolithic times, but it is where the initial understandings of how and why sounds, both pleasant and unpleasant, are made.

Pythagoras of Samos, the famous Greek philosopher of the mid 4th century BCE, began to experiment with a vibrating ...