Abstract
MANY readers of NATURE will learn with regret of the death of Mr. Joseph Goold, of Nottingham, who passed away in his sleep in the early morning of November 15 at the age of ninety years. He had retained all his faculties until the end. Mr. Goold was well known to many through his invention of a novel method of causing steel bars and plates to vibrate. His method was to fix a short length of cane in a suitable handle, and having arranged the cane to vibrate at a particular frequency, he gently stroked the plate or bar with the end of the cane. The friction set the cane into a state of vibration, and its small motions were imposed upon the plate or bar, which was set into a very active state of similar vibration. Mr. Goold gave many demonstrations of his experiments at conversaziones of the Royal Society, and at meetings of the British Association. He used to relate that this method of vibration suggested itself to him while he was thinking of the difference between the sound of a creaking door and that of a musical instrument. For many years Mr. Goold had worked at new ideas in connexion with the musical scale. A paper on this subject by Mr. Goold was communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and published in the Proceedings, vol. 40, part 2, No. 18, June 21, 1920. He says in this paper: “The scale is primarily a system of intervals rather than a series of notes; for though its divisions are marked by notes (just as the divisions of a ruler are marked by lines) the divisions themselves are not notes but intervals.” Since then Mr. Goold has extended this investigation, and was working at it practically until the time of his death.
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[Obituaries]. Nature 118, 849 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/118849a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/118849a0