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IT HAS BEEN recorded that the first experiment in acoustics made by Harvey Fletcher occurred a few moments after he was born on Sept 11, 1884, in Provo, Utah, when he exhaled the air he had just taken into his lungs and produced such a loud and disturbing noise that all around him could not ignore it, and particularly as it was promptly repeated, again and again, so that, needless to say, he received what he wanted.
Whether this successful experiment had any influence on his future work is highly doubtful. At any rate, he graduated from Brigham Young University and was awarded his PhD degree from the University of Chicago under R. A. Millikan, the great physicist and the second American to receive the Nobel Prize in physics. He returned to his alma mater to become head of the Department of Physics where his research