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Scan 32
The violin, how to make it, 1880
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 26. See the scan on archive.org.
1who also combined his theory with practice, was the learned French philosopher, M. Savart, born in 1791, who, for a period of 20 years, ardently and thoughtfully studied those laws of construction, from which laws have been attained the most pre-eminent practical results. To avoid the parrot repetitions, or stereotyped teaching and unmethodical system of books upon this subject, based upon the shallowness that rests content with assertions, leaving causes uninvestigated, I merely refer the reader to the rough translation of Savart's lectures, as given in the following Chapter, for therein will the student find much valuable matter, both interesting and instructive. For the present, I shall merely glance over a few other particulars, several of which are not included in the lectures above referred to. The Violins of Stradivarius were chiefly those which Savart experimented upon; but ere he made those important discoveries, afterwards detailed, he had recourse to almost innumerable trials, in every manner which his keen and learned mind suggested.
3Taking the Violin as a whole, we find, from Savart's researches, that every element of the instrument was beautifully and skilfully made in a proportionate degree, to maintain the necessary sonority and vibration. In a few, but indeed very few, of the Violins of the Cremonese makers, we find some of those rules have been a little departed from; but assuredly, the more they deviate from those well-known facts, the worse they are in quality, and even in those few which have been found dissimilar, it has been always to attain some required peculiarity of tone, which the maker wished his instrument to possess.
5Referring to the woods chiefly used in the formation of the instrument, we find that if we make two equal-sized rods, one of pine and the other of maple, with the grain running similar in each, and nip one end of each in a vice, by drawing a well-rosined Violin bow across the upper end, we put each in vibration alternately,—we will find that the pine rod gives a more acute sound than the maple one, and consequently possesses the highest normal tone. The number of vibrations given by a vibrating plate is in direct proportion to its thickness—thus, a plate twice the thickness of another, other conditions being similar, will give twice the number of vibrations. Previous to the com-
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