Floyd Firestone

Floyd Alburn Firestone (1898–1986)[1] was an acoustical physicist, who in 1940 while a professor at the University of Michigan invented the first practical ultrasonic testing method and apparatus.[2] He was granted US Patent 2,280,226 for the invention in 1942. Manufactured by Sperry Corporation, the testing device was known variously as the Firestone-Sperry Reflectoscope, the Sperry Ultrasonic Reflectoscope, the Sperry Reflectoscope and sometimes also just as a Supersonic Reflectoscope, the name Firestone had originally coined for the instrument. The technology is not just used in quality control in factories to reject defective parts before shipment, but also revolutionized transportation safety. For example, ultrasonic testing is used for safety maintenance inspection of railroad cars, particularly axles and wheels, aircraft, particularly fuselages, and other transportation vessels for material fatigue.[3][4] Dr. Firestone’s ultrasonic pulse echo technique for metal defect testing was also later applied in medical diagnosis, giving birth to the field of Echocardiography and to the field of Medical Ultrasonography, generally.[5][6][7] Dr. Firestone was the editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America from 1939-1957.[2] Among Firestone’s many other inventions in his field are in a single year an “automatic device for the minute inspection of flaws”, “a new and useful improvement in hook-up of electrical apparatus”, and “[a] device for measuring noise”,[8] and, even, later a “musical typewriter”.[9]

Paper

Firestone, Floyd A. (1946). The Supersonic Reflectoscope, An instrument for inspecting the interior of solid parts by means of sound waves. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 17(3), 287-299, Full Article

See also

Nondestructive testing

References

  1. ↑ Ancestry .com-Freepages
  2. 1 2 Beyer, R.T. (1999). Sounds of our times: 200 years of acoustics. New York, New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 246-247.
  3. ↑ Fahr, A., Ph.D. (2014). Aeronautical Applications of Non-destructive Testing. Lancaster, Pennsylvania: DEStech Publications, Inc., p. 150
  4. ↑ ICNDT
  5. ↑ Full Article – Siddharth, S. & Goyal, A. (2007). The origin of echocardiography. Tex Heart Institute J., 34(4), 431-438.
  6. ↑ Levine, H. III. (2010). Medical Imaging. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC., p. 62
  7. ↑ Nicholson, M. & Fleming J. E. E. (2013). Imaging and Imaging the Fetus: The Development of Obstetrics Ultrasound. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  8. ↑ Proceedings of the Board of Regents. (1929). Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, p. 452
  9. ↑ Staff. (1948, August). Machine types simplified music. Popular Science, 153(2), 143.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 8/22/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.