Joseph Sauveur

Despite a hearing and speech impairment that kept him totally mute until he was seven, Joseph benefited from a fine education at the Jesuit College of La Flèche.

Despite his handicap, Joseph promptly began teaching mathematics to the Dauphine's pages and also to a number of princes, among them Eugene of Savoy.

In 1681, Sauveur did the mathematical calculations for a waterworks project for the "Grand Condé's" estate at Chantilly, working with Edmé Mariotte, the "father of French hydraulics.

In 1686 he obtained the mathematics chair at the Collège de France, which granted him a rare exemption: since he was incapable of reciting a speech from memory, he was permitted to read his inaugural lecture.

As Fontenelle put it, Sauveur laid out a vast plan that amounted to the "discovery of an unknown country", and that created for him a "personal empire", the study of "acoustical sound" (le son acoustique).

Furthermore, they did not like the equal tuning he was proposing for instruments, nor the pa, ra, ga, so, bo, and so forth that were supposed to replace the familiar ut, re, mi, fa, sol.... (Sauveur had broken the octave into 3,010 parts.)

Actually, Loulié had begun going his own way by 1698, when he published a little book called the Nouveau Sistème, which presents his work with Saveur from a musician's perspective.

Now, in 1701, Sauveur focused on the shortcomings of his former colleague's device, compared with his own échomètre: Loulié's invention was not based on the second, and the swings of the pendulum were not related to one specific note value.

In that same presentation before the Academy, Sauveur presented his own monocorde for tuning harpsichords (it was based on an octave divided into equal units composed of the tiny, precise units of his "new system"); and he contrasted his invention with Loulié's sonomètre, approved by the Academy in 1699, which replicated the unequal intervals actually being used in France.