Galileo's Abandoned Project on Acoustic Instruments at the Medici Court

Abstract

Galileo's old friend, the painter and mathematician Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli, wrote from Rome on 24 February 1613 about a rumour that was circulating: someone in Padua had invented an instrument able to greatly multiply the sense of hearing.1 Da Cigoli asked Galileo for more details. A full five months earlier Galileo's former pupil Daniello Antonini had informed Galileo that Paolo Aproino, another former pupil, had produced something in Treviso near Venice.2 These two events mark the period, 1612-13, when new developments were taking place in the field of acoustics. With epistolary guidance from Galileo, Paolo Aproino was constructing an ear trumpet.Ear trumpets did not first appear at the beginning of the seventeenth century. If the ear trumpet is seen as an enlargement of the ear auricle to improve hearing, then this instrument is as old as the practice of cupping a hand to the ear, or of using perforated seashells with various pipes to extend their range. Thus, to find out why Galileo and Aproino's ear trumpet was considered to be such a novel and even miraculous device is quite a challenge. If the entire seventeenth century is considered, then an investigation becomes even more intriguing, for this period embraces a wealth of inventors of the ear trumpet.At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the ear trumpet was considered to be a product of human art in the Aristotelian sense and thus treated as either the completion of what nature had left unfinished - for instance, a relatively deaf human ear - or as the result of a construction process guided by the principle of imitation of nature.3 By the end of the century, however, the ear trumpet had come to be seen as a mechanical instrument. Its creators ceased to investigate it from the perspective of natural philosophy or to associate it with any natural product.4 The emergence of a new interpretation of the acoustic instrument is immediately connected with the seventeenth-century conflict between two different conceptions of sound: the Aristotelian, based on the concept of sensible quality and violent motion, and the mechanical, based on the analogy between optics and acoustics.Galileo and Aproino's project in acoustics is directly connected to this conflict. Although the project was a success from a technological point of view - Aproino devised a very efficient ear trumpet - they decided to abandon it. To understand why this happened, a brief survey of the history of the ear trumpet will be given in the following. This will show how investigators shifted the instrument from the realm of traditional natural philosophy into the framework of modern mechanics, with the explicit intent to disregard any investigations concerned with the nature of sound and, especially, to focus only on the technical efficiency of the instrument. Parallel to this process of reconfiguration of the acoustic instrument, it will be shown how the Aristotelian conception of sound came to be renounced in favour of a new mechanical interpretation. Finally, Galileo and Aproino's project will be analysed in the context of the dominant conception of sound in the early seventeenth century. And to understand why in the end Galileo and Aproino abandoned the project, the institutional role of the court in scientific practice will be considered. The paper closes with the question of why so many seventeenth-century figures considered themselves to be the first to invent the ear trumpet. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the concept of novelty applied to early modern technology.Translations of the relevant sources are appended at the end of the paper.IMITATION OF NATURE5No doubt, ear trumpets have been in use since time immemorial.6 According to Harald Feldmann,7 Archigenes the famous Roman doctor suggested to Emperor Trajanus, who was hard of hearing, that he use a tuba placed close to the ear. Moreover, funnelshaped objects of bronze with spiral tubes at the narrow end, found close to Pompeii, are thought to have been ear trumpets. …