Page 33 - Winter 2011

UP IN KNUDSEN’S ATTIC:
SOME PRIVATE PAPERS OF VERN O. KNUDSEN
Neil A. Shaw
Menlo Scientific Acoustics, Inc. Post Office Box 1610 Topanga, California 90290-1610
This article is about a pioneer and a giant. An educator, researcher, adminis- trator, facilitator, author, and mentor— who I never met in person, but came to know only by happenstance and circum- stance. (See Fig. 1)
I started to collect books on
acoustics, engineering, mathematics,
and related subjects and became familiar
with two books by Vern Knudsen—
Architectural Acoustics1 and Acoustical
Designing in Architecture,2 the second
written with the late Cyril Harris. My awareness of Dr. Knudsen grew during the intervening years in a more or less disinterested way until one day in the spring of 2004 when I received an e-mail message from a Mr. James Knudsen. He asked if the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) had a his- torian who might be interested in looking at some papers that were found while cleaning out his grandfather’s home in preparation to donating the house to UCLA. His grandfather was Vern O. Knudsen.
I made an appointment and went to see what possibly could be left, 30 years after Dr. Knudsen’s death—perhaps a few items of interest. During my initial visit, I found many boxes of his technical books, architectural project files, corre-
“Those who learned their acoustics from textbooks dated before about 1915 will gasp when they compare this up-to-date-text with those of yesteryear.”
spondence, and his ASA Gold Medal as well as other honors.
Another appointment was set and, along with my friend and fellow ASA member Mark Gander, we spent a day sorting through the boxes of books and papers. We left with six or seven large boxes of papers as well as some archi- tectural drawings. These papers and drawings are now part of the Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA). They were indexed in 2010 by Masters degree student Julia Morton under the direction of UCLA Archivist Charlotte Brown. With the indexing and cataloging of the trove from Dr. Knudsen’s Pacific Palisades home, the Vern Oliver Knudsen archive3 has grown by about a third to 57 boxes of material and 8 drawing folders.
An updated finding guide for the Knudsen collection at
4
the UCLA archive is now available on-line. The finding
guide includes the recently archived documents and allows for word searches within the guide. The complete holdings, however, are not available on-line but must be viewed in the Special Collection reading room at the Young Library by spe- cial arrangement.
Fig. 1. Vern O. Knudsen in laboratory (undated).
Knudsen’s Attic 29