Koenig\Helmholtz site and a newish biography of Koenig

Found that the translation of Koenig that the bio by David Pantalony discusses is available online and as a pdf without having to use an academic library subscription. It details the experiments in which Koenig discovered inharmonicity: "On the Simultaneous Sounding of Two Notes," trans by William Spottiswoode, president of the Royal Society, in The Philosophical Magazine of June, 1876:

http://books.google.com/books?id=h0HtyB...mp;f=false

A Google book, since the copyright has expired. The pdf can be downloaded from there, or http://books.google.com/books/download/...pWOt91RsKg

Koenig is using forks, here. No piano in sight. He seems to be saying that he's finding what we would call iH when combining the sound of several tuning forks, and that pure partials just don't exist in nature even when the near sine tones of forks are played together. (Alexander Ellis argued that his forks were bad.) I've seen recent articles arguing that forks have iH, too.

Just posting this out of historical interest. Koenig is of course discussed in many books, but the translations published at the time give his actual methods and figures as he discovers inharmonicity.

Alexander Ellis responds formally to this article in a later edition of his translation of Helmholtz's Sensations.... Section L, page 527, "Recent Work on Beats and Combinational Tones":

http://books.google.com/books?id=ncdfAA...mp;f=false

or the pdf is at http://books.google.com/books/download/...3_ALln3LbA

A long battle.

EDIT: Just occurred to me that I may have posted that link from JSTOR, which will block access unless you're logged in.

Hm...I just tested it, and it works here. Try it again and let me know.

(I'm also finding a long series of late 19th century articles on beats and beat-tones produced by slight tuning changes in The Philosophical Magazine and other journals. Apparently the question of beats was as contentious a subject as iH. And of course, they're related, so the two subjects come up a lot together, although the writers are trying to understand the relationship. Not a simple discovery, but instead a determined examination of the data and different theories as explanations. Bosanquet comes in partly defending and partly qualifying Koenig. Ellis weighs in and seems to waver. It's a kind of compact history of empiricism slowly overcoming Plato, Pythagoras, Leibniz, and to some extent Helmholtz. But it comes late--in the late 19th century, only as Koenig develops the equipment to analyze and combine partials. I'll post a bibliography and set of links once I've gone through more of it. There's a less well-known Koenig article, referenced by Bosanquet, that I'm still trying to find in translation. Not sure if all of Koenig has been translated, actually.)

But let me know if that link still doesn't work.