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Measuring the speed of sound

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Written by
Richard E. Berg
Supervisor, Teaching Support Services; Director, Lecture-Demonstration Facility, Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park. Coauthor of The Physics of Sound.
Richard E. Berg
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Article History

Once it was recognized that sound is in fact a wave, measurement of the speed of sound became a serious goal. In the 17th century, the French scientist and philosopher Pierre Gassendi made the earliest known attempt at measuring the speed of sound in air. Assuming correctly that the speed of light is effectively infinite compared with the speed of sound, Gassendi measured the time difference between spotting the flash of a gun and hearing its report over a long distance on a still day. Although the value he obtained was too high—about 478.4 metres per second (1,569.6 feet per second)—he correctly concluded that the speed of sound is independent of frequency. In the 1650s, Italian physicists Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Vincenzo Viviani obtained the much better value of 350 metres per second using the same technique. Their compatriot G.L. Bianconi demonstrated in 1740 that the speed of sound in air increases with temperature. The earliest precise experimental value for the speed of sound, obtained at the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1738, was 332 metres per second—incredibly close to the presently accepted value, considering the rudimentary nature of the measuring tools of the day. A more recent value for the speed of sound, 331.45 metres per second (1,087.4 feet per second), was obtained in 1942; it was amended in 1986 to 331.29 metres per second at 0° C (1,086.9 feet per second at 32° F).

The speed of sound in water was first measured by Daniel Colladon, a Swiss physicist, in 1826. Strangely enough, his primary interest was not in measuring the speed of sound in water but in calculating water’s compressibility—a theoretical relationship between the speed of sound in a material and the material’s compressibility having been established previously. Colladon came up with a speed of 1,435 metres per second at 8° C; the presently accepted value interpolated at that temperature is about 1,439 metres per second.

Two approaches were employed to determine the velocity of sound in solids. In 1808 Jean-Baptiste Biot, a French physicist, conducted direct measurements of the speed of sound in 1,000 metres of iron pipe by comparing it with the speed of sound in air. A better measurement had earlier been carried out by a German, Ernst Florenz Friedrich Chladni, using analysis of the nodal pattern in standing-wave vibrations in long rods.