Hurricane events with the tesseract loudspeaker
Well, Hurricane Irene has begun hammering the coast, but it surely slipped by me down right here in Florida. I dwell manner out within the boonies on the Nature Coast of Florida aka the Gulf Coast aka the West Coast. To date out on the edge that Irene didn't even tickle us here.
Down right here we have a famous tradition of having hurricane parties which is principally a getting collectively of idiots to drink themselves unconscious whereas ungodly forces rip buildings aside and wash away folks's houses. Should you survive the storm you might have one other drink and call it a tempest in a tea cosy or some such thing. I feel I'll do some writing as a substitute, whereas it's quiet here.
It's late now, nearly 2AM EST and I sit right here, as typical, in entrance of the pc that is most of my life, reflecting on past and imaginary glories. There is a story I need to inform, something I needed to inform lengthy ago. It was a long time in the past after I actually thought I had something vital to inform the world, but with out assets and mass media it was damned arduous to get the phrase out. Now that the Internet is right here Ive a chance to succeed in more people. If you're a physicist like me, or a musician like me, or are focused on hyperspace like me, you would possibly find it interesting. And sure, it is a true story, the story of U.S. Patent 4,231,446.
As soon as upon a time, nobodys in backwoods Florida created the loudspeaker tesseract. How do I know this, since most dont That's easy. I was one of those nobodys my title is on the patent because the co-inventor.
I had just returned to Florida after spending years on the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland studying Engineering Physics. My father, you see, was a profession naval aviator who retired to Florida; he had 5 sons and three of us tried to observe in his footsteps. My oldest brother William graduated from USNA and served on nuclear submarines. My subsequent youthful brother David graduated from USNA and became a back-seater (radar intercept officer or "RIO") in F-14 Tomcats. (His squadron was used to movie footage for the film Top Gun.)
I was the one one within the household to use, receive a Presidential appointment, attend USNA and then NOT graduate. It was as a result of I noticed the handwriting on the wall not like my father, I put on glasses and would never have certified for Aviation. Unlike my older brother, I want making the grades to qualify for Nuclear Energy school. I faced the fact that I was surviving the hazing but would never have a profession like my father's.
So I resigned and left. Was it as a result of I couldn't take the pressure? No, I had already made it by means of the toughest yr (Plebe yr) and one other yr besides. However I just didn't see myself sitting on a destroyer or cruiser for 20 years of boating. So I left. It ought to have been apparent where I was going I had the college of Florida (Gainesville) ship me a catalog of courses. I figured my future was in Physics, not Floating.
Enrolling in UF continuing my major in Physics, I ran into a good friend from my residence city who was there as a Business major (back then you definately needed to be a Business major to take programming programs; the IT degrees didn't exist). We resumed discussions we had begun years earlier, about issues like Hypercubes (tesseracts), Moebius Strips, and Klein Bottles.
In the future I made a decision to assemble a cardboard model of one of the projections of the 4-dimensional hypercube onto our 3-space. This surface is often drawn by drawing slightly dice centered inside a bigger dice, with the corners connected. Nicely, drawings are nice, but I needed to carry it; I needed something tangible.
I shortly noticed that I may make six pyramids with their tops cut off (like the pyramids of Mexico and so on) into square faces; shove them collectively and the six square tops of the truncated pyramids would form the little dice inside the bigger cube. So I began slicing and taping pieces of posterboard.
Only I put it collectively inside out. While I was taping it I noticed that there were methods to put the pieces together. I already knew how the one way would look, so I taped them collectively the other manner, taping the bases of the pyramids collectively in order that the tops of the pyramids faced outwards within the up, down, left, right, ahead, and backward directions.
When my good friend noticed it he was amazed; neither of us had seen something like it before. He made some models himself, with full pyramids, not chopped off on the prime, in order that it looked like a dice with pointy pyramids sticking out from every face (see above for the tiny wood model I am holding).
Gainesville is a celebration faculty, well-known for it. While we were goofing off listening to Queen and Jethro Tull and Styx (1976-1977) we were holding the cardboard models of these inside-out projected tesseract shapes and we noticed something; they appeared to have a bizarre resonance behavior. Hole objects are like bells or organ pipes they vibrate strongly at their natural resonant frequency determined by dimension, and far less at other frequencies. However these durn models gave the impression to be resonating to ALL of the frequencies. I told myself it was most likely as a result of the cardboard wasn't thick enough. But it surely was bizarre we may really feel the music, all of it, when we held the hypercubes.
When he went residence for the summer time my good friend showed the model to his father and steered it would make a cool shape for a loudspeaker enclosure. His father, who had actually built loudspeakers as a interest when he was youthful, told my good friend that the concept was ridiculous.
By no means inform a genius he is stuffed with baloney! Tom went straight to his room, pulled down a couple of his paintings, scraped the paint off them, cut up the masonite with a sabre noticed, and created the world's first tesseract loudspeaker enclosure. He mounted slightly speaker to it and went to go show his dad a thing or two. After they turned it on, they were floored. The little 3-inch woofer was placing out more bass than it had any right to...and all the other frequencies too! And there gave the impression to be little or NO distortion! AND it was omnidirectional --- placing music out in all directions. AND it had a tremendous transient response --- which MLSSA testing exhibits as an simply-seen distinction within the "spectral decay" or "waterfall" plot of the regular vs. hypercube loudspeaker tesseract.
Presently my brother James (2 of 5) and me (3 of 5) were experiencing the fun of a summer time job as Graveyard Shift "Custodial Hosts" at Walt Disney World. James obtained to shine the brass and I obtained to mop floors and wash monorail windows, realizing kiddie fingerprints would be all over them ten minutes after the park opened the subsequent morning.
Tom may have stored his discovery for himself. He didn't. He insisted that my title ought to be on the patent too, since he had gotten the concept from my inside-out hypercube model. So we labored on the patent application together. Right here is the first page. We determined to keep away from quite a lot of hassles by referring to the geometry by its conventional title the Rhombic Dodecahedron. There have been quite a lot of methods to make use of the geometry; we would have liked quite a lot of costly drawings to cover all the feasible variations. Drawings1. Drawings2. Drawings3.
Sure, we had greenback signs in our eyes. Wealth was just across the corner. All we had to do was get a producer to license the design and pay us royalties, and we'd be on our method to wealth and safety and fame.
Ever hear of the "Not Invented Right here" syndrome? Individuals who make their residing doing something are rarely blissful when something new comes up that makes earlier designs out of date --- until of course they invented it. We ran into this problem quite a bit over the years.
The problem was, Tom and I didn't invent the sector of Audio Engineering, and it had existed lengthy enough, its consultants concluded, to have discovered all about how loudspeakers work. What we had discovered simply didn't match into the paradigm. Loudspeaker enclosures are considered a identified science, with nicely-identified problems and equally nicely-identified merchandise designed and engineered to beat stated problems. Perhaps I might have agreed with the consultants, except (a) I didn't have any degree yet and (b) I have ears.
If we had had the assets to just swing into full production and show them up within the marketplace, history might have been different. However we didn't, so we made the error of wasting quite a lot of time and household funds trying to persuade the experts. So we began setting up, demonstrating, and testing prototype after prototype, being naive enough to think that working models would be enough to show we were not crazy. No one argues with a working model, right?
So we bought typical loudspeakers and converted them. Generally we converted each the left and right models; typically we converted one and left the other in its original enclosure. We found we may do that with plywood, sheet metal, plastic...the shape didn't care, as long as it was the appropriate shape. (Geometry is powerful; a parabolic dish works just as nicely in tin or aluminum as it does fabricated from solid gold.)
Along the way, we picked up bits of audio engineering to assist us explain the variations, and labored on a mathematical idea to elucidate why the shape was such an improvement. You see, conventional woofers are dipole radiators --- they shout "out" of the box however the back of the woofer shouts INTO the box. And that inside power is the issue; when you confine it and try to muffle it with stuffing, you get a less environment friendly speaker (and distortion). Should you cut a vent to make a "ported" loudspeaker, the "backwave" (which is 18o degrees out of part with the "frontwave") interferes with the frontwave at most frequencies, making a boomy box that performs inconsistently, though it's more environment friendly than the sealed or "acoustic suspension" design because you arent throwing away half of the power by keeping it inside the box.
The problem is, these were and nonetheless are the 2 predominant loudpseaker designs. A few rascals with PhDs in audio engineering known as Thiele and Small codified it of their idea, which attempts to predict how loudspeakers behave based mostly upon the "Thiele-Small Parameters" of a particular design, which you plug into an equation to predict the frequency response curve.
So when consultants requested us what our Thiele-Small parameters were, we looked dumb. So what if our tesseract loudspeakers outperformed their typical ones? At the very least THEY had a mathematical idea that other folks believed. "You made our speaker omnidirectional? Nonsense!"
After we failed to curiosity anyone in using this unbelievable technology, spending ourselves broke, I grew discouraged and enrolled within the College of Central Florda (Orlando) to complete my degree in Physics. The patent was granted on eleven/4/1980 and my B.S.Physics degree was awarded on 12/19/1981.
Pondering possibly it was just a matter of degrees, I applied and was accepted into physics grad faculty at Florida State College (Tallahassee --- where the hanging chads fall where they might). At this point I was nonetheless ignored like a crackpot --- but a crackpot who was in a doctoral program! Perhaps after I was Dr. Kennedy they consultants would a minimum of take heed to a demonstration....
Grad faculty was boring compared to what I already knew. And the maths was, nicely, hellish; I couldn't wrap my thoughts round elliptic integrals and Hermite polynomials. And then I met a girl known as Shirley Malone. More of her later; I can't do her justice in a paragraph. I dropped out of graduate faculty and moved north with her to Delaware, where I was a night adjunct at Wesley Faculty educating night calculus-based mostly physics classes. Not enough money in that to survive, so we moved to Maryland and I obtained programming jobs, eventually doing ASP Net development for Sylvan, Walter Reed Military Hospital and Agile Access Control. Shirley and I built more tesseract loudspeakers through the years, demonstrating their energy and purity for Pier Six Pavillion within the interior Harbor in Baltimore and many others. However financial backing all the time eluded us.
In 2000 Shirley was diagnosed with an aggressive invasive most cancers and died through the ballot recounts. The patent had expired in 1997; it was slightly humiliating that none of the major firms (even ones we had contacted about it) bothered to repeat it. We couldn't generate profits on it, couldn't even get folks to make it for free. It nonetheless works. The prototypes nonetheless work.
After I was laid off from my telecommuting job I struggled to make ends meet within the comparatively costly northen Virginia, where we had moved to be near her children. Ultimately I was broke, unable to sign a brand new lease, and moving back to Florida.
Sorry, that was an extended story, I guess. But it surely's a true story. Not the story of my life, as a result of hopefully I will have a number of more chapters before I shuffle off this mortal coil. However the story of the tesseract loudspeaker. The patent exists. The prototypes exist. We have unbiased assessments to show our design reduces distortion and flattens frequency response. However nobody's listening.
Heh. I guess you thought I'd be trying to promote you something by now. No. I would like money, sure, like quite a lot of people. However this isn't a touchdown web page or a squeeze web page; I'm just trying to share the knowledge, nonetheless trying to get it into the ears of somebody who can find more applications. I've obtained a number of ideas there, but forgive me if I don't disclose all of them with out more patents; I'm nonetheless ready to tilt at a number of more windmills before I retire into even additional obscurity.
Okay, boo-hoo, I didn't get rich. Waugh! So what? Life goes on. And there are all the time new contributions to make. Shapes that affect wave behavior are amazingly vital to technology look at the Dish community and try to imagine it with out parabolic reflectors. The inside-out projected tesseract has, I think, a lot more to do for us if we give it a chance. --MRK
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