History of Nonlinear Acoustics: 1750s–1930s

The history of nonlinear acoustics is reviewed, starting with Euler in the 1750s and continuing into the 1930s with contributions from Earnshaw, Fay, Fubini, Hugoniot, Lagrange, Langevin, Laplace, Poisson, Rankine, Rayleigh, Riemann, Stokes, and Taylor. This era produced the exact implicit Poisson and Riemann solutions for progressive and counterpropagating plane waves in an ideal fluid, respectively, Earnshaw’s extension of Poisson’s solution that accounts for finite motion of the source, the Rankine-Hugoniot conservation equations across a shock, Fubini’s solution for harmonic generation in the preshock region, Fay’s solution for the harmonics following shock formation, and the Taylor shock thickness.