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measurements in theaters. Emeritus membership and the Biennial Award were established in April 1940, and at the same time, donations of JASA were made to three libraries in China where many reference libraries had been destroyed. Finally, a Patent Review section in JASA was begun, and the first technical committee—on musical acoustics—was appointed.
ASA’s minutes for the Society’s December 31, 1930 meeting show that Professor K.T. Compton from the American Physical Society (APS) spoke to the Council about APS’ financial problems and their need to rely on wealthy benefactors to publish The Physical Review. The Council approved entering into a cooperative venture with the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America for publishing journals. In 1931 the Acoustical Society, along with three other professional societies, joined together to create the American Institute of Physics (AIP) with the primary purpose of providing facilities for pub- lishing and other common activities. In May 1932, the Executive Council voted to transfer publication of JASA to AIP. ASA’s relationship with AIP continues today with the Institute providing a wide variety of services to the Acoustical Society.
Financial conditions during the depression are not very evident in the ASA minutes except for the fact that expens- es were kept very low. In May 1931, the treasurer reported “the business conditions continue, although there seem to be signs of improvement beginning some time in the latter part of the present year. In endeavoring to foresee business conditions of the Council, in the Treasurer’s judgement, one should not lay too much weight on the prevailing deep pes- simism in New York and the East generally.” In November of the following year, the treasurer felt that the ASA did not need to request additional funds from industry, noting “our best information is that no important improvement in busi- ness can be expected until several months after the inaugu- ration of President Roosevelt.” Not much else was men- tioned about financial difficulties even though they must have been present for the Society. An increasing reliance was placed on member dues and less on contributions from corporations. Some members were kept on the membership rolls even though they were three years in arrears in dues. Annual expenses for the Society were only in the $3,000 to $5,000 range, mainly because no labor expenses were allo- cated to the Society. The Society kept the approximate amount of expenses in reserves, although the American Institute of Physics was in debt in the latter part of the 1930s. By the time of the November 15, 1940 meeting, for- eign subscriptions to the Journal were dropping because of world conditions.
3. World War II and immediate post-War years • 1941–1948
As with the rest of the world, World War II (WWII) had its effect on the Society. During this period, only one meeting was held each year, in the spring of 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945. During the same period, the number of pages in JASA dipped from 550 in 1940, to 220 pages in 1944. However, membership increased over this period by about 6% per year.
Obviously, the wartime effort and security measures were taking their toll on the publication output and ability to organize meetings, but members felt it was still important to maintain their memberships in the Society during those war years.
Many members were involved in applications of acoustics to the war. Frederick V. (Ted) Hunt organized and directed the Underwater Sound Laboratory at Harvard University (HUSL) during the war years 1941–1945. At the end of the war a portion of the Laboratory was moved to Pennsylvania State University where it is now still very active in acoustics as the Applied Research Laboratory (ARL). Leo Beranek was director of the Electro-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University. Other laboratories and research centers began carrying out miliary, industrial and academic acoustics, including the University of Texas at Austin.
The years just after the war marked an increase in research on all fields of acoustics. In 1946, the Society found the need to reorganize its membership structure to allow for “a wide and active participation, without meaningless strati- fication, of all persons having legitimate connection with the field that would be appropriate for the advancement of acoustics.” Also at this time, the grade of Associate Membership was established.
An article in JASA published shortly after the war ended noted “A large fraction of the membership was engaged during the recent war in the development of new weapons utilizing acoustical principles, particularly the development of equipment utilizing underwater sound.” It ended by predicting, “The outlook for the future of the Society is bright. The war has spotlighted physics in gen- eral and acoustics in particular. Our future meetings will bring forth many interesting papers and our journal will continue to record the accelerated history of the develop- ment of acoustics.” This came to be true as membership in the Society grew from around 1000 members in 1945 to 6500 in 1990. From 1945 to 1965, it grew at almost 7% per year. The number of papers published in JASA increased at about the same rate. The nature of the Society also changed during these years. In 1966, Wallace Waterfall reported that 26% of ASA’s members had doctoral degrees; in 2002, this percentage had grown to 67%. He also reported that 27% of the members were employed by academia and 45% by industry. By 2002 this had switched, with about 40% from academia and only 16% from indus- try.
A tremendous amount of defense-related work in acoustics was conducted during the war but it was never published in the open literature. Articles on research con- ducted in underwater acoustics, acoustical oceanography, transducers, hearing aids, acoustical measurements, and speech communication were published in a huge collection under the auspices of the National Defence Research Council (NDRC). Hundreds of scientific and publications professionals were involved in this project that began in March 1945 and ended in May 1948. The project was authorized by Vannevar Bush, and administered by none other than Wallace Waterfall!
38 Acoustics Today, October 2006