Abstract (eng)
It was a consequence of the international pitch standard conference 1885 in Vienna that physicists at the University of Vienna got the task of calibrating tuning forks. This office existed until 1938. In this thesis the tuning forks and tuning fork apparatus from the physical-historical collection of the University of Vienna are described and examined. These objects can be dated around 1900, in some cases even one to two decades earlier. Not only individual tuning fork sets are explored, but also electromagnetically operated tuning forks and a wide variety of devices, in which a tuning fork is an integral part, such as the tuning fork watch, the vibrating microscope, the tuning fork interrupter and the tuning fork resonator are studied. Using a microphone, an oscilloscope or the software Audacity, the frequencies of the selected tuning forks are reexamined. The existence of a correlation between tine length and frequency for Rudolph Koenig’s large tuning fork cassette is successfully verified, as well as, comparably, for steel rods used for testing the limit of hearing. Simple and fast experiments that can easily be incorporated into physics lessons are, for example, beats generated with two tuning forks or the amplification of the vibration with a resonator. However, the experiments carried out to create Lissajous‘ figures using two mirrored tuning forks and a laser beam or a vibration microscope are more complex.