the.com/loudspeaker
a magnet, a coil, and the audacity to shove air around until your ears agree
means A device that converts an electrical signal into sound loud enough to fill a room, hall, or street.
from A plain English compound of "loud" and "speaker," coined in the early days of electrical sound reproduction (around the turn of the 20th century) — "speaker" because it spoke, "loud" because that was the whole point. "Loud" itself traces back to Old English "hlud" and a Germanic root, a distant cousin of words in Latin and Greek for "hearing" and "glory" — the same ancient family that gave us "listen."
- how it works
- electromagnet wiggles a cone to vibrate air
- reverse mic
- a speaker run backward becomes a microphone
- loudest ever
- NASA's horn can hit 154 decibels, melting matter
- horn ancestry
- early gramophones used pure shape, no electricity
- named bluntly
- the word literally just means speaks loud
big ben — the great bell in elizabeth tower, london, rang at 97 decibels when it struck the hour
siren at marseille dockyard — industrial air-raid siren tested in france reaches 120+ decibels, audible for miles