The Fairy-Land of Science eBook

You may see an excellent example of this in a luggage train in a railway station, when the trucks are left to bump each other till they stop.  You will see three or four trucks knock together, then they will pass the shock on to the four in front, while they themselves bound back and separate as far as their chains will let them:  the next four trucks will do the same, and so a kind of wave of crowded trucks passes on to the end of the train, and they bump to and fro till the whole comes to a standstill.  Try to imagine a movement like this going on in the line of air-atoms, the drum of your ear being at the end.  Those which are crowded together at that end will hit on the drum of your ear and drive the membrane which covers it inwards; then instantly the wave will change, these atoms will bound back, and the membrane will recover itself again, but only to receive a second blow as the atoms are driven forwards again, and so the membrane will be driven in and out till the air has settled down.

This you see is quite different to the waves of light which moves in crests and hollows.  Indeed, it is not what we usually understand by a wave at all, but a set of crowdings and partings of atoms of air which follow each other rapidly across the air.  A crowding of atoms is called a condensation, and a parting is called a rarefaction, and when we speak of the length of a wave of sound, we mean the distance between two condensations, or between two rarefactions.

Although each atom of air moves a very little way forwards and then back, yet, as a long row of atoms may be crowded together before they begin to part, a wave is often very long.  When a man talks in an ordinary bass voice, he makes sound-waves from 8 to 12 feet long; a woman’s voice makes shorter waves, from 2 to 4 feet long, and consequently the tone is higher, as we shall presently explain.

And now I hope that some one is anxious to ask why, when I clap my hands, anyone behind me or at the side, can hear it as well or nearly as well as you who are in front.  This is because I give a shock to the air all round my hands, and waves go out on all sides, making as it were gloves of crowdings and partings widening and widening away from the clap as circles widen on a pond.  Thus the waves travel behind me, above me, and on all sides, until they hit the walls, the ceiling, and the floor of the room, and wherever you happen to be, they hit upon your ear.

Week 17

If you can picture to yourself these waves spreading out in all directions, you will easily see why sound grows fainter at the distance.  Just close round my hands when I clap them, there is a small quantity of air, and so the shock I give it is very violent, but as the sound-waves spread on all sides they have more and more air to move, and so the air-atoms are shaken less violently and strike with less force on your ear.