Békésy, Georg von (1899–1972)

Hungarian-born US scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1961 for resolving the long-standing controversy on how the inner ear functions by discovering the mechanism of stimulation within the cochlea.

Life Békésy was born in Budapest and studied there and at Berne, Switzerland. From 1923 to 1946 he worked in the laboratories of the Hungarian Telephone System and of Siemens and Halske in Germany, as well as holding academic posts. He emigrated to Sweden in 1946, and then to the USA in 1947. He was on the staff of Harvard in the period 1947–66, when he became professor of sensory sciences at the University of Hawaii.

Work While working as a telecommunications engineer, Békésy investigated how the human ear actually receives sound. He constructed models of the cochlea and also worked with cadavers, whose auditory mechanisms he stimulated electrically. By substituting a saline solution containing fine aluminium particles for the fluid in the cochlea and by using stroboscopic illumination, he was able to observe how sound vibrations are transmitted to a membrane in the form of travelling waves. Each wave causes maximum vibration at different sections of the membrane according to its frequency.

Later, Békésy extended his interests to visual and tactile sensations, which he measured and recorded. He developed an audiometer – an instrument that determines whether deafness is caused by damage to the brain or to the ear – so that the appropriate treatment could be determined at an earlier stage.

Békésy also devised a means by which he enabled the skin to ‘hear’. His apparatus consisted of a greatly enlarged version of a cochlea – a long tube filled with fluid and with a membrane running along its length. If the forearm of a person were pressed against the membrane, the skin of the arm felt the high and low sounds sent through the tube at distinctly different positions along the arm.