Since the frequency of the tone is directly proportional to the rate at which the teeth strike the card, a Savart wheel can be calibrated to provide an absolute measure of pitch.

[4] Hooke began work on his wheel in March 1676, in conjunction with the renowned clockmaker Thomas Tompion, following conversations with the music theorist William Holder.

[5] He had a longstanding interest in musical vibrations, and a decade earlier in 1666 had even boasted to Samuel Pepys that he could tell the rate a fly's wings were beating from the sound they made.

[9] Savart used his wheel as a practical alternative to John Robison's siren, which was also being adopted at the time by Charles Cagniard de la Tour to test the range of human hearing.

In 1873, the Austrian physiologist Sigmund Exner reported the auditory ability to distinguish successive clicks from the wheel (or, alternatively, rapidly snapped electric sparks) at time intervals as close as 2 milliseconds (1/500 sec).

[14] A modified wheel that produced varying numbers of clicks at different intervals was later used by the American psychologists G. Stanley Hall and Joseph Jastrow, who in 1886 reported on the limits to the human perception of acoustic discontinuities.

Rasping vibrations are induced in a plectrum when it comes into contact with the ridges that line each disk at regular intervals, and are amplified in a styrofoam cup which acts as a sounding board.