Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apts
Classifieds
Shop
Chances are no one will ever mount a plaque commemorating the event, but last year, on a private landing strip on Doty Road on the east side of Allen County, Curt Graber set a world record. He’s got a certificate from the Guinness World Records people verifying it.
We could get technical here, but put simply, Graber demonstrated the loudest acoustic speaker system in the world, capable of focusing a beam of sound with a volume of 140.2 decibels at 128 meters.
That’s loud. To give you an idea how loud, the roar of an F-15 fighter jet engine with its afterburners on is about 145 decibels at 50 to 60 meters. Graber was able to project a beam of sound nearly as loud for a distance of about 440 feet.
This is probably enough to make your typical 20-something searching for the ultimate sound system erupt into screams of ecstasy. But don’t bother asking where to buy one.
Someday, Graber might rig up a system for Eddie Van Halen. But for now, this system is intended for ships, the military and police seeking to break up riots, not for guys looking to blast rap songs out of the trunks of their cars.
The system is the brainchild of a company called Wattre Corp., which operates out of a metal building outside Harlan, as unlikely a place as there is for a company setting world records and pioneering technologies.
Actually, there are three companies working out of the same building. One, called Custom Sound Design, specializes in sound systems for huge churches all over the country. Graber founded that company in 1987. Just a few years before that, when he was 14, Graber developed an improved speaker using technology that Bose also developed – three years later.
A few years later, though, Graber started pondering a whole new type of speaker.
In acoustics, there is a law known as the inverse square. That law says that every time you double the distance from the source of a sound, you lose at least 6 decibels of volume. This means that if you have a bullhorn that puts out sound at 125 decibels at 1 meter, a level regarded as near-deafening, by the time you are 64 meters away, the sound is only 89 decibels, about as loud as urban traffic.
Whatif, Graber wondered, he could defy that law and design a speaker that produced a focused beam of sound that didn’t diminish nearly as fast as regular noise?
Well, why would anyone want to do that?
Graber remembers the attack on the USS Cole. After that attack, the Navy established a 500-meter perimeter around all its ships. But what if a boat with, say, an outboard motor violates that perimeter? Short of sinking it, how do you communicate with it?
Ships have bullhorns that operate at 125 decibels at 1 meter, but unless a boat is closer than 60 meters or so, the bullhorns can’t be heard over the roar of something as commonplace as an outboard motor.
Graber’s gadget could project a 125-decibel sound beam at least 250 meters. In demonstrations, he has projected a spoken human voice more than 2 miles, farther than a stock walkie talkie.
If he could develop a speaker with a focused beam of sound, it would be possible to communicate with the boat and be heard over the roar of the motor even hundreds of yards away.
At the same time, the sound beam is focused, so if it’s not aimed at you, you don’t hear it.
For three years, Graber struggled to find the answer and got nowhere.
If he had been smart, maybe he would have listened to the experts at Penn State and MIT who told him what he was trying to do was impossible.
But one night, Graber had a dream. He had a speaker that did exactly what he wanted. He woke up, went to the kitchen, sketched the speaker he saw in the dream and the next day went to work on it. Within a week and a half, he had a working model that was unlike anything he had envisioned in the previous three years.
The technology, called the Hyperspike, is just now coming into its own. It has made its debut at trade shows, where it has caught the attention of lots of people, mostly military and police officials. It has also caught the attention of companies that are trying to buy him out, now that he’s cracked the technological nut.
Like any invention, Graber says, its uses will be developed by the people who buy it, ranging from controlling crowds to chasing birds off runways. He envisions the day when a Hyperspike speaker can be used by the military to communicate with a platoon standing next to an idling tank 1,000 feet away, avoiding giving themselves away with radio transmissions.
The French are even interested in the speaker for crowd control, like using loud, irritating, but not damaging sounds – think fingernails scraping on a blackboard as loud as a jet engine – to break up riots. It beats sending hundreds of riot officers armed with shields and clubs charging into mobs.
It’s not about loud, though, Graber says.
“I’d never subject anyone to a higher amplitude than hearing can take without damage,” Graber says.
It’s really about communication.
Graber tells a story he heard during the Iraq war: A man and his son had left to go to the grocery. On the way home, they came upon a military checkpoint full of soldiers yelling in English. They didn’t stop and were shot to death.
Just think, Graber says, if you could combine an electronic translating device with his Hyperspike. The right message could be delivered far away. Technology like this might have saved the two Iraqis, who were just coming home from the grocery, and a lot more people in the future.
