Harvey Fletcher (September 11, 1884 – July 23, 1981) was a physicist known for his pioneering work in acoustics at Bell Telephone Laboratories during WW2 and thereafter. In 1911, Fletcher was the first physics student to earn a PhD summa cum laude from the University of Chicago. His dissertation research was on methods to determine the charge of an electron. This included an oil drop experiment, commonly attributed to his advisor Robert Millikan, who earned a Nobel Prize for work largely conceived and conducted by Fletcher. After completing his doctorate, he returned to BYU, where he became the head of the physics department. He served in this capacity from 1911 until 1916. Fletcher left BYU to work at Western Electric, establishing himself as a researcher with hearing aid and audiogram developments. He co-founded the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in 1931. At Bell Labs (1933 to 1949 ), his interest turned to the physics of sound. Known as the father of stereophonic sound, he demonstrated multi-channel sound delivery to an amazed audience in New York in 1934. He served as Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University from 1949 to 1952. He returned to BYU in 1952 to be a director of research, becoming the first dean of the new College of Physics and Engineering Sciences.

Harvey Flether continued research at Brigham Young until 1981, producing scientific papers on musical instruments. I was fortunate to have personal interactions with him. I was a PhD student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, under the mentorship of William J. Strong, from 1968 to 1972. Dr. Fletcher became an Emeritus Professor in the late ’60s. We occupied offices next door to each other in the basement of the Eyring Science Building. He was busy writing papers from notebooks he had kept for many years, butoccasionally he stepped out of his office to interact with students. We all studied from his book “Speech and Hearing in Communication”, in which sound production and sound perception were always treated in parallel. The Fletcher-Munson equal loudness level curves are fundamental to all voice and speech science. They explain the difference between sound pressure level recorded with an instrument and loudness perceived with the human auditory system.

Bio by Ingo R. Titze, PhD