Page 41 - Fall 2006

4. 20th and 25th anniversary celebrations • 1949–1954
After the depression and WWII, the Acoustical Society was celebrating its peacetime growth along with the rest of the nation. The Twentieth Anniversary meeting held at the Hotel Statler in New York in 1949 drew an attendance of 417, while the total membership had reached 1400 members. The theme for the meeting, “Acoustics and Man,” seemed to indi- cate an interest in non-military applications of acoustics. A “founder’s luncheon” was attended by 21 of the original founding members (see Fig. 2) who assembled for a photo mirroring the one shown in Fig. 1.
One problem that resulted from this growth was expressed in Floyd Firestone’s report on the 1951 Chicago meeting: “The growth of the Acoustical Society has brought with it the neces- sary evil, the programming of papers into simultaneous ses- sions, so that the member has to decide which papers he will miss, with the result that he may just stand out in the hall and visit. By contrast one can recall an announced meeting at Ann Arbor about a decade ago when only four papers had been received by the deadline date and it was necessary to stir up some progress reports in order to fill out the program.” The growth of the Society had changed some of its character.
Although both membership and attendance at meetings were growing, the financial benefits were waiting in the wings for the 1950's boom to begin. Wallace Waterfall had been using 70 pound paper for JASA, but in 1948 decided to drop down to 55 pound paper to save money. This decision was probably promoted by Treasurer Nixon who pointed out that the Society had only $16,000 in the bank, and esti- mated that the publication of JASA would cost $25,000 to publish in the coming year. The Society actually ran in the red for three years, and so in 1950, it was decided to accept advertising in JASA. The Society also initiated a meeting registration fee of $2.00 for meetings, increased page charges from $4.00 per page to $8.00, and promoted a pro- gram to obtain more sustaining members.
There was also considerable reorganization of the leader- ship structure during this time period as well. In 1948 the Executive Council decided that a President-elect should be chosen so that he could be prepared better to take on the responsibilities of President. In the same year it was decided that the Acoustical Society should appoint its own standards committees rather than originating standards under the American Standards Association. A year earlier the Council had established a formal Standards Committee with the explicit goal to keep the Executive Council better informed about standards activities. Later in 1968 the Executive Council had established the position of Vice President-elect, and assigned the Vice President the duty of serving as chair of the Technical Council.
Regional Chapters were also established in the early 1950s in response to interest by members to form local groups, and by 1954 four chapters had been organized. This program has expanded and contracted over the years in response to the needs and desires of local groups.
The 25th Anniversary meeting in May 1954 was very well recorded for posterity. The four-hour 25th Anniversary banquet was filmed, and the transcript is printed in JASA. A
“Parade of Acoustical Personalities” was the title of the pre- sentations by all the living Presidents at that time—gathered either in person or by recorded messages. There were several acousticians who attended from countries outside the United States including Belgium, England, Germany, India, Italy, and Japan. The Society’s first Gold Medal was awarded at that meeting to Wallace Waterfall. The medal was designed by Richard Bolt who used a tuning fork made by Rudolf Koenig and borrowed from the collection of Dayton Miller as a model for the design of the medal.
The film of the banquet was intended for viewing at future anniversary meetings and was, in fact, shown at the 75th Anniversary. A special “Time Capsule Custodial Committee” was appointed shortly after the celebration meeting to arrange for the film’s care and safe-keeping. It was with this confidence of the survival of the Society combined with cold war worries that the members of committee placed the 16 mm film in the Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation located in upstate New York. They also kept one copy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as a pre- caution against a widespread disaster that the committee noted “could conceivably not wipe out both of these loca- tions.” Even though the intent of the committee was for the transmission to “our hundredth Anniversary Celebration,” the film was eventually removed from Iron Mountain in 1976, and a film and negative are now stored at the American Institute of Physics Center for the History of Physics in College Park, Maryland.
History of ASA 39