Wallace C Sabine

Wallace Clement Ware Sabine was an American physicist and acoustician, born in Richwood, Ohio, in 1868, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1919. His work is one of the foundations of architectural acoustics, the discipline that studies how sound behaves within buildings, and he brought it onto an engineering-based footing.

He was educated at Ohio State University and at Harvard, where he taught physics from 1890. He developed his principal contributions between 1895 and 1919. His first acoustic commission arose from a request by Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot, to correct the serious reverberation problem in the lecture hall of the Fogg Art Museum. At Eliot's suggestion, he also acted as consultant for Boston Music Hall, where his results were highly regarded and clearly demonstrated what could be achieved when acoustic design was planned before the building was constructed.

His best-known contribution is the discovery of the relationship between reverberation time, the absorptive capacity of materials and the volume of a room. This relationship was a fundamental and original contribution. The unit of sound absorption power bears his name, the sabine, in recognition of his work. His Collected Papers on Acoustics were published posthumously in 1922.