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" I think that computers today allow us one last opportunity to provide something like a level playingfield in America."
- William Gibson
 |
| Fenton Silencer | ||
| A device to cancel noise over a broad area. |
In this amusing story from Tales from the White Hart, one of the patrons of the pub tells the story of young Robert Fenton, who was stronger on practice than on theory - unfortunately.
| "Doubtless some of you will already see what I am driving at, and will appreciate the basic principle of the Fenton silencer... It consisted of a microphone, a special amplifier and a pair of loud speakers. Any sound that happened to be about was picked up by the mike, amplified and inverted so it was exactly out of phase with the original noise. Then it was pumped out of the speakers, the original wave and the new one cancelled out, and the net result was silence. Of course, there was rather more to it than that. [But]... it's a simple application of negative feedback. |
| Technovelgy from Tales from the White Hart,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Ballantine Books in 1957 Additional resources -
|
This is from Silence Please, the first story in this book of short stories, first published in 1957.
This story offers good engineering detail on noise cancellation; however, I think that Robert Heinlein's hush corner beats the Fenton Silencer by a nose, having been published in Double Star in 1956. Also, see the isolation barrage from Wandl, The Invader (1939) by Ray Cummings and the sound nullifier from Prima Donna 1980 by Bernard Brown. Don't miss the more thorough-going sound-killing air fluid from The Noise Killer (1930) by AM McNeill.
Of course, this basic principle of sound cancellation was known for some time; for example, this from The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe:
Thanks to Paul, who wrote in about this story in a comment on another technovelgy item.
Another took two loud sounds and out of them made a silence. Another constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant lights.'
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