Science: Whistling in a Bathtub

“On the evening of Oct. 8, I was at Angmering-on-Sea, and my host, Mr. Kenneth Barnes, called me to listen to the wind playing, and took me to the bathroom, which faced down wind. The wind was blowing hard and gustily, and was producing a most amazing effect—exactly as though a flageolet were being played by a human performer. . . .” Through London’s clubs last month droned the account of Sir Richard Arthur Surtees Paget’s “most extrawd’nry” experience in that bathroom and his clever solution of the mystery, which he promptly reported to Nature. Few men in England could have resolved the matter so promptly as did this inquisitive sexagenarian baronet, barrister, linguist, musician,acoustician. Sir Richard’s musical ear told him that the tune he heard that evening was in E major, with A sharp substituted for A flat. “The melody,” he relates, “did not slur up & down as when the wind whistles through a cranny, but changed by sharply defined steps from note to note. The melody included runs, slow trills, turns and grace notes and sounded so artificial that I felt bound to open the window and make sure that the tune was not being played by a human performer out of doors.” When Mr. Barnes assured Sir Richard that there was no spoofing, the learned acoustician cocked his ears at all corners & crannies of the bathroom at Angmering-on-Sea. The overflow drain of the bathtub told the story. Next morning Sir Richard examined the pipe. It was about 1 1/6 in. in diameter, about 3 ft. 5 in. long, in the form of an S-bend. At the tub end of the tube was a perforated waste guard. The other end of the tube was open and passed through the wall to let the tub water run out onto the open ground. Sir Richard put his lips to the pipe’s open end, blew. A low, sepulchral reverberation grumbled up the pipe. “The natural frequency of the pipe when blown into by mouth was about 161—that is, three octaves below the keynote of the scale previously indicated,” observed Sir Richard. Evidently, “the wind was playing on the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th overtones of the pipe, and the melody was being produced by the rapid fluctuations of wind-pressure.” The mystery and his solution make Sir Richard “wonder whether such an effect can ever have occurred in Nature—a broken bamboo stem, for example, partially obstructed at its windward end, and so shielded by vegetation, soil, etc., as to produce a pressure difference between its open ends? The effect of elaborate melodies thus produced without human intervention would be highly magical and suggestive.”