Background
Georg Von Bekesy was born on June 3, 1899, in Budapest, the son of Alexandor von Békésy, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Paula Mazaly. As a child he lived in Munich, Budapest, Constantinople, and Zurich.
( Psychological experiments carried out over a period of ...)
Psychological experiments carried out over a period of nearly forty years led Georg von Bekesy to realize that inhibition interconnects, at least in one respect, the fields of vision, hearing, skin sensations, taste, and smell. This book indeed almost creates the field of sensory inhibition as a significant one for study, bringing understanding to many observations that formerly seemed uncertain or unrelated and raising many problems still to be solved. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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(Freemans publication of the article about the ear from th...)
Freemans publication of the article about the ear from the scientific American magazine of 1957 by von Bekesy.
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biophysicist physiologist scientist
Georg Von Bekesy was born on June 3, 1899, in Budapest, the son of Alexandor von Békésy, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Paula Mazaly. As a child he lived in Munich, Budapest, Constantinople, and Zurich.
Békésy studied and loved music, developing enough skill on the piano to contemplate a concert career, but he soon came to prefer studying the plastic arts, especially sculpture. As early as his teens he had accumulated an estimable collection of objets d'art. After completing his secondary school education in Zurich and Budapest, he matriculated in 1916 at the University of Bern, where he received his baccalaureate in chemistry in 1920. At the end of World War I, the Békésy family finances and prospects were in ruins. Békésy returned to Budapest and served briefly in the military. Still with no particular career goals in mind, he entered the University of Budapest in 1920 and emerged in 1923 with a Ph. D. in physics, specializing in optics and interference microscopy. His dissertation was on fluid dynamics.
Unable to find a job in optics, Békésy accepted a government position in the laboratory of the Hungarian Postal, Telephone, and Telegraph System. Its notoriously poor telephone service, plagued by internal engineering problems, was causing numerous malfunctions throughout Europe. Békésy was assigned to determine which of the three major components - sending equipment, transmitting lines and switches, or receiving equipment - was most responsible for the faults. Using a line-monitoring test that he had devised, he soon determined that the earphones of telephone receiving sets were the weakest link in the chain. He began to consider ways to reduce the unacceptable levels of distortion they created.
This research naturally and quickly led to the study of the human ear. In the 1920's, the official view of the mechanism and physiology of the human ear was the one that Hermann von Helmholtz had formulated in the 1860's. Békésy was able to proceed beyond Helmholtz by inventing revolutionary techniques of dissection and microscopy in which the specimen was immersed in fluid. These techniques kept the middle and inner ear in a lifelike state longer after death, and thus permitted more accurate and detailed observations.
Except for the period 1926-1927, spent at the Siemens and Halske Laboratories in Berlin, Békésy worked for Hungarian Telephone for twenty-three years. He began teaching at the University of Budapest in 1932, becoming professor of experimental physics in 1940. He continued his research unperturbed throughout the Nazi period, but he found that the Soviet occupation after World War II brought an intolerable climate for further study and emigrated to Sweden in 1946, resuming his work at the Karolinska Institutet. The following year he went to Harvard University, where in 1949 he was appointed senior research fellow in psychophysics. While at Harvard he was naturalized as an American citizen.
Békésy won the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine mainly because he was regarded as a helper of the deaf. His discoveries about the mechanics, acoustics, and physiology of hearing had enabled physicians to identify, diagnose, and treat many different kinds of deafness. Later he acknowledged and returned this honor by bequeathing his greatest treasure, his collection of art works and rare books, to the Nobel Prize Foundation.
Békésy's attraction to the study of the ear was originally, and remained primarily, aesthetic. He appreciated not only the beauty of sound but also the beauty of the physical structure of the ear, especially the inner ear. He was so awestruck by the organum spirale the first time he saw it under a microscope, that he decided to stay the course of investigating the ear.
In 1966, Békésy retired from Harvard and assumed a chair endowed by the Hawaiian Telephone Company as professor of sensory sciences at the University of Hawaii. He remained in this position until his death in Honolulu. Békésy was quiet and reserved but friendly and charming, with an excellent sense of humor. He was so absorbed in art and the ear that he claimed to prefer the lonely scholar's existence.
( Psychological experiments carried out over a period of ...)
(Freemans publication of the article about the ear from th...)
(EXPERIMENTS IN HEARING. Georg von Békésy. Classic on hear...)
Georg Von Bekesy was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Art also contributed to Békésy's laboratory method and scientific achievements. He said that learning to distinguish among art objects - genuine from fake, one period or genre from another, high quality from kitsch - had given him habits of scrutiny that helped him to analyze problems in physics.
Georg Von Bekesy never married and had no children.