August Seebeck
Encyclopedia
Jena
Jena is a university city in central Germany on the river Saale. It has a population of approx. 103,000 and is the second largest city in the federal state of Thuringia, after Erfurt.-History:Jena was first mentioned in an 1182 document...
– 19 Mar. 1849 in Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
) was a scientist at the Technische Universität Dresden.
Seebeck is primarily remembered for his work on sound and hearing, in particular with experiments with an acoustic siren that demonstrated that the pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...
of a tone did not depend on the tone having a fundamental frequency component of the pitch frequency. His observations and theories are now highly regarded, but historically suffered in the battle with Ohm
Georg Ohm
Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm began his research with the recently-invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that there is a direct proportionality between the potential...
and Helmholtz
Hermann von Helmholtz
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science...
, who took a Fourier analysis view of the sound of tones.
With respect to Ohm's acoustic law
Ohm's acoustic law
Ohm's acoustic law, sometimes called the acoustic phase law or simply Ohm's law, states that a musical sound is perceived by the ear as a set of a number of constituent pure harmonic tones.The law was proposed by physicist Georg Ohm in 1843...
, historians have concluded that Seebeck "successfully discredited the hypothesis and forced Ohm to withdraw from the field."