Ultrasound - History

History

Acoustics, the science of sound, starts as far back as Pythagoras in the 6th century BC, who wrote on the mathematical properties of stringed instruments. Sir Francis Galton constructed a whistle producing ultrasound in 1893. The first technological application of ultrasound was an attempt to detect icebergs by Paul Langevin in 1917. The piezoelectric effect discovered by Jacques and Pierre Curie in 1880 was useful in transducers to generate and detect ultrasonic waves in air and water. Echolocation in bats was discovered by Lazzaro Spallanzani in 1794, when he demonstrated that bats hunted and navigated by inaudible sound and not vision.

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