With a Lissajous apparatus—devised by Jules Antoine Lissajous (1822-1880), a French mathematician—a beam of light is bounced off a mirror attached to a horizontal tuning fork, then off a second mirror attached to a vertical tuning fork, and then onto a wall. The resulting images are the graphs of complex harmonic motions known as Lissajous figures. This example came from the Smithsonian Institution Instrument Room. The "RK" inscription is that of Rudolph Koenig in Paris.
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