Pulse speed on a plucked wire

Abstract

This paper serves to update an elegant experiment published in The Physics Teacher to measure the speed of a pulse on a taut metal wire.1 Unfortunately, commercially available units2 that serve the same purpose are priced outside the range of most high school or college physics teaching laboratories. Wakeland et al. show how an affordable adaptation of the traditional standing wave apparatus using taut metal wire and horseshoe magnets can be used to measure the speed of a pulse by using an oscilloscope to measure an induced voltage in the wire as the pulse transverses the middle of the magnets, which are a known distance apart.