WONDERS OF SCIENCE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18598, 8 January 1935, Page 4

WONDERS OF SCIENCE

NOISE OUT OF SILENCE TECHNICI AN’S APPARATUS NEW YORK, Dec. 4. Tune in your radio on a snowflake falling on a feather bed. It will crack every tube in your set. You may also hear a goldfish swimming in a bowl. It makes a noise like n broken steam radiator; and it: it gobbles a bubble, of air, if will sound like cracking a knife again.-.!, a crockery plate.. The ' lowly earthworm, crawling through a flower pot J.ull of dirt, will create the effect ■ol a freight-train going over a trestle. Oust, tha I hangs daily oyer cities will' sift, upon a tabic top with the cattle of hail.on a tin roof. A truck, driven, over a cobblestone road, will make enough noise to burst every eardrum within-:i radius of 1 000 miles, and would knock down hall New York’s skyscrapers. Such are the wonders of science, as demonstrated last night, by Mr. E. E. Free, scientific, sound technician. Dr. Free can make a noise out. of silence. “Give me a mouse,” he declared, “and I will show you how silly is the expression ‘silent us a mouse.’ I will produce a sound like a maddened elephant, scrambling through a bamboo thicket. ’ ’ Dr. Free will demonstrate lus apparatus o.ver a national radio broadcasting hook-up on Saturday night. He has developed a “sound microscope” that magnifies noises ton thousand billion times. Dr. Free’s experiments included tho noise made by a boll weevil inside a grain of wheat. It sounds like Niagara Falls. Ho played a symphony on a beehive, tuning his apparatus for bass, treble and a super-attenuated high note that was like a cross between a steam calliope and Galli Curci with a, broken windpipe. “There is no such thing as silence, Dr. Free said.