Harvey Fletcher

Infobox_Scientist
name = Harvey Fletcher


birth_date = birth date|1884|9|11|df=y
birth_place = Provo, Utah, USA
nationality = United States
death_date = death date and age|1981|7|23|1884|9|11
death_place = Provo, Utah, USA
field = Physics
work_institution = Western Electric
Bell Laboratories
Columbia University
alma_mater = Brigham Young University
University of Chicago
doctoral_advisor = Robert Millikan
known_for = Invention of the hearing aid
The Father of stereophonic sound
prizes = Presidential Citation
ASA Gold Medal
religion = Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
footnotes =

Harvey Fletcher (September 11, 1884 – July 23, 1981) was an American physicist. He is credited with the invention of the hearing aid and the audiometer. He is remembered as a trail-blazing investigator into the nature of speech and hearing, and for his numerous contributions in acoustics, electrical engineering, speech, medicine, music, atomic physics, sound pictures, and education.

Fletcher was born in Provo, Utah and was educated at Brigham Young University (BYU). As a graduate student, his dissertation research was on methods to determine the charge of an electron. This included the now famous oil drop experiment commonly attributed to his advisor and collaborator, Robert Millikan. Professor Millikan took sole credit, in return for Fletcher claiming full authorship on a related result for his dissertation. [cite magazine|title=In the Case of Robert Andrews Millikan|url=http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/MillikanII.pdf|author=David Goodstein|journal=American Scientist|date=Jan-Feb 2001|pages=54-60] Millikan went on to win the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics, in part for this work, and Fletcher kept the agreement a secret until his death. [cite journal | title = My Work with Millikan on the Oil-drop Experiment | author = Harvey Fletcher | journal = Physics Today | date = June, 1982 | pages = p. 43]

Among the work that he is best known for are Fletcher's contributions to the theory of speech perception. He showed that speech features are usually spread over a wide frequency range, and developed the "articulation index" to approximately quantify the quality of a speech channel. [cite book | title = Articulation And Intelligibility | author = Jont B. Allen | publisher = Morgan & Claypool | isbn = 1598290088 | year = 2005 | url = http://books.google.com/books?id=t6ltHy-o2fIC&pg=PA25&dq=harvey+fletcher+jont&ei=s_XWRtlLhdqkAtOFuYMF&sig=06LSqNND8HXTSwD7AzlksRBEeO4#PPA25,M1 ] He also developed the concepts of, equal-loudness contours, loudness scaling and summation, and the critical band. [cite book | title = Signals, Sound, and Sensation | author = William Morris Hartmann | isbn = 1563962837 | year = 1997 | publisher = Springer | url = http://books.google.com/books?id=3N72rIoTHiEC&pg=PA72&dq=harvey+fletcher+1981&as_brr=3&ei=FfjWRpSOM4qUogLpuaiDBQ&sig=5glVlrR8NyMbbybEigV5LrREIOQ ]

Dr. Fletcher was elected an honorary member of Acoustical Society of America, an honor which was shared by only one other man—Thomas Edison. [cite book | title = Bell Laboratories Record | author = Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. | volume = Vol. 27–28 1949–50 | year = 1949 | url = http://books.google.com/books?id=1NpQwAgMoJ0C&q=harvey+fletcher+thomas+edison&dq=harvey+fletcher+thomas+edison&ei=XjBmR-SSEp-OtgOjnYifAw&pgis=1 ] He was president of the American Society for Hard of Hearing, an honorary member of the American Otological Society and an honorary member of the Audio Engineering Society. In 1924 he was awarded the Louis E. Levy Medal for physical measurements of audition by the Franklin Institute. He was President of the American Physical Society which is the leading Physics society in America. In 1937 he was elected vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a member of the National Hearing Division Committee of Medical Sciences. He was given the Progress Medal Award by the American Academy of Motion Pictures, in Hollywood. For eight years he acted as National Councilor for the Ohio State University Research Foundation.

Fletcher was the Founding Dean of the BYU College of Engineering (now the Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology).

He died on July 23, 1981, after a stroke.

References

External links

* " [http://www.et.byu.edu/~tom/family/Harvey_Fletcher/harvey_fletcher.html In Memory of Harvey Fletcher] " - a brief biography and collection of links
* [http://education.byu.edu/comd/index.html Department of Communication Disorders at BYU] - Audiology department at BYU