The herald-advance. (Milbank, S.D.) 1890-1922, 1909-05-21

anu C~ulllluCu COIiSCI-
sation Stimulates the roar of
shotted artillery isn't much of a al
gible asset around the capitol. So Mr..
Woods has been worried and has been
looking around for a reliable remedy
for the trouble.
Al: this is by way Of Introduction to
James Henry Harper, V. A. c., who
may be called upon to doctor the pub
lie h~earing-rooms. Mr.. Harper is a
little man. with grayish hair and
twinkly eyes, who has a new method
for treating cirrhosis Of the acoustics.
Up to a recent date, whenever an
architect put up al auditorium or
something that was a poem from the
outside, but acoustically was SO i'm
possible as to make straightaway talk
sound like the last mouthings of John
Mccullough, there were only a couple
of cures known. One of them was to
line the inside of the upper part of the
auditorium with felt and clutter it all
up with fatty upholstered furniture
and %draperies and soft stuff Of all
kinds, on the theory that it would soak
up the super1uous sound. Another
method was to string a bunch Of
wires across the top of the auditori-
I'm. This was in the hope that the
wires would strain the sound, letting
all the extra rumbling and jumbling
filter through and go out the sky
lights, and bounce the useful noises
back at the audience.
These two methods do not amount
to much, but they comprise the whole
list. The felt and furniture hang
ings and other things used as sound
sponges made a building fearfully in
sanitary, and the wires strung up in
the air made it look like a telegraph
office in a busy city.
But Mr.. Harper has a brand new
method that has worked fine, he says.
He discovered that sound doesn't trav-
ell in waves like light, but jumps along
by magnetic impulse, and he has fig
ured out, too, that it doesn't make a
bit of difference what material is used
in a building. just so long as it's shape
is correct. This discovery simply de-
stroys the regulation theory, and many
learned professors occupying chairs
in colleges have amused themselves,
Mr.. Harper says, by jumping up and
down on his frame. But now he feels
better, because, he says, most of them
are coming around to his way Of
thinking.
Anyhow, when Mr.. Harper, who has
quit regular engineering and now de-
votes his entire time to ventilation,
acoustics, and chromatics, is called in
Of q Job, he does not proceed to bull
the felt market and order all the thick
furniture I'm sight.
He looks at the shape of the hall or
auditorium or theater or church, or
whatever II may be, and then he
stands in the middle of the main floor
and claps his hands or yells. He does
this many times until he knows all
about the reverberations, and the
resonance, and such. Then when he
has this all down, he does some more
figuring, and finally winds up by in
stalling an invisible canopy to keep
the sound from going up and up and
up, and playing hide and seek midst
Doric columns and Gothic windows,
and pure Greek pilasters and Geor-
gian domes, and other architectural de-
lights, but acoustic horrors.
Mr.. Harper explained that he uses
silk threads because silk is full of mag
netism and potentiality and all that.
So when he stretches his invisible spi-
der web of silk across a hall it acts
like a real ceiling and sound hasn't
a chance of getting by to reverberate
and echo and double up and play the
deuce generally. He claims that he
has tackled auditoriums that would
make the clearest voice that ever
came out of the silvery throat of an
oratorical headliner sound like the
Swiss bell ringers on a jag, and
fixed them up with his silk
spiders web -
u ntil the
acoustic prop e oIEninlle y elu
critics we're Ma21s