History - Text 1
Medicine, in the eighteenth century, drawing on the laws of mechanics to analyse organic phenomena, established concretely the framework for an initial interaction between research into acoustics and that into optics. A century later, the great rise in biology and experimental physiology encompassed this connection to an even greater extent within an entire arsenal of experimental methods and new technical means. There was a decisive epistemological change; as Georges Canguilhem has remarked,
the radical difference between the physiological experimentation of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth century was the systematic use by the latter of all the instruments and devices which the physical and chemical sciences, then in full flight, enabled this experimentation to adopt or construct, to both detect and measure phenomena.[1]
This new approach was applied in every field, from exploring the human body to analysing a question of physics, making it possible to compare phenomena of different natures. In addition, in the nineteenth century work based on the analysis of audio and visual phenomena was carried out on a common ground of experimentation: the reproduction of movement. Whether in the case of a physiologist studying human or animal locomotion or of a physicist working on the propagation of sound waves, it was a question of using an instrument to analyse an event unfolding in space and time. During this period scientific instruments were forged for the painstaking observation of phenomena; over the course of numerous improvements, they would, paradoxically, find a place among the era’s toys — to supply light and shadow shows and acoustic pastimes — or find themselves serving a utilitarian function ranging from the medical field to industrial applications.
By adopting and reworking these instruments, scientists would meet without ever exchanging a word. The vibrating device for recording movement invented by Thomas Young in 1807 was later adopted and modified by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857 for his phonautograph, by Thomas Edison in 1877 for his phonograph, by Étienne-Jules Marey in 1857 for his chronographic devices and, beginning in 1889, by Abbot Rousselot for his experiments in speech, right up to the earliest attempts to record sound on a sensitive surface.
