In 1862, Rudolph Koenig, an acoustic instrument maker in Paris, devised a manometric apparatus in which the flame of a burning gas jet vibrates in response to the variations in pressure of a sound wave. Three years later, the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale awarded him a gold medal, noting that “The most curious of all his inventions is . . . without doubt the one that uses gas flames as a means for revealing the vibratory movements of air.”
This manometric capsule (missing tube and mouthpiece) was probably made by Koenig, and probably purchased for the Smithsonian by Joseph Henry, the physicist who served as founding Secretary of the Institution.
Ref: Rudolph Koenig, Catalogue des Appareils d’Acoustique (Paris, 1889), p. 84.
David Pantalony, Altered Sensations: Rudolph Koenig’s Acoustical Workshop in Nineteenth-Century Paris (2009), p. 58
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