SABINE, WALLACE CLEMENT WARE

(b. Richwood, Ohio. 13 June 1868; d Cambridge, Massachusetts, 10 January 1919)

physics.

Sabine’s parents, Hylas Sabine and Anna Ware, were both college-educated and had a strong interest in literature and science. His father, at one time a member of the Ohio State Senate and state commissioner of railways and telegraphs, was a farmer and landowner who lost most of his holdings in the panic of 1873. His mother, eager to see her two children do better, raised them both under a stern moral and educational regimen. The elder Sabines were practicing Protestants . but as an adult Wallace belonged to no church and professed no religious faith.

After earning an A.B. at Ohio State University in 1886. Sabine went to Harvard, where in 1888 he was awarded an M.A. in physics and in 1890 appointed to an instructorship. Neglecting to take a Ph.D.. he devoted himself to teaching, and his courses were among the most popular in the department. A full professor in 1905, he was instrumental in the creation of the Harvard graduate school of applied science, which he administered as dean from 1906, the year of its founding, until 1915.

Following the United States’s declaration of war in 1917. Sabine held various administrative posts in what became the Army Air Service. In June 1918 he became director of the Department of Technical Information of the Bureau of Aircraft Production, and that September he was appointed to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics by President Woodrow Wilson. At his death Sabine was a member of the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was married in 1900 to Jane Downes Kelly, a physician of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As a research physicist Sabine is known for having turned architectural acoustics from a qualitative, rule-of-thumb practice into a quantitative engineering science. He started work in this field in 1895, when Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard, asked him to do something about the very poor acoustics of the lecture hall in the university’s new Fogg Art Museum. Measuring the time during which a given sound reverberated within the hall. Sabine found that a single syllable of speech persisted long enough to overlap confusingly with those that followed it. By hanging sonically absorptive materials on the walls, he reduced the reverberation time and, hence, improved the acoustical quality of the room.

In 1898, at Eliot’s urging, the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White turned to Sabine for advice on the design of Symphony Hall in Boston. Using the raw data from his Fogg Museum experiments, Sabine managed, with the ingenious use of graphs, to derive an acoustical law of general applicability. He showed that the product of the reverberation time and the summed absorptive power of the walls, furnishings, and materials of appointment equaled a constant; and that this constant was directly proportional to the volume of the room. The formula enabled Sabine to predict the acoustical properties of an auditorium in advance of construction. The practical value of his law was confirmed by the acoustical success of Symphony Hall, and its essential scientific validity was demonstrated by a later analysis of reverberation that employed statistical methods from the kinetic theory of gases.

In 1900, in a comprehensive paper on reverberation. Sabine set down what have since been accepted as the three basic criteria for good acoustical quality in any auditorium: sufficient loudness, minimal distortion, and maximum distinctness. In subsequent years Sabine, who made his expertise available free to numerous architects, investigated how interference and resonance affect acoustics and the best way of sonically insulating a room. In honor of Sabine’s seminal significance in architectural acoustics, the unit of sound-absorbing power is called the sabin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sabine’s Collected Papers on Acoustics (Cambridge, Mass., 1922) contains almost all of his important articles. A useful introduction to his life and work is Edwin H. Hall, “Wallace Clement Sabine,” in Biographical Memories, National Academy of Sciences, 11 . no. 13 (1926), 1–19. William Dana Orcutt, Wallace Clement Sabine: A Study in Achievement (Norwood, Mass., 1933), apparently was commissioned by his widow and emphasizes Sabine’s personal life and character.

Daniel J. Kevles