He has done important work in the field of hearing physiology: Who is Georg von Bekesy?

(1889-1972) American physicist of Hungarian origin, who carried out important studies in the field of hearing physiology. He was born in Budapest on June 3, 1889. After studying chemistry at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where his father was a diplomat, he returned to his country and received his doctorate in physics from the University of Budapest in 1923. In the same year, he became the director of the research laboratory of the Hungarian Telephone Administration and continued in this position until 1946.

Meanwhile, he was sent to Berlin for a year on a research mission and worked in the laboratory of the Siemens und Halske company between 1926 and 1927. In 1939 he was promoted to professor of experimental physics at the University of Budapest. Bekesy, who left both his job at the university and in the telephone administration in 1946, went to Sweden the same year and started working at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Georg von Békésy (3 June 1899 – 13 June 1972) was a Hungarian-American biophysicist. By using strobe photography and silver flakes as a marker, he was able to observe that the basilar membrane moves like a surface wave when stimulated by sound.

Although he settled in the USA and became an American citizen in 1947, he continued his cooperation with this institute until 1952. In his first year in the USA, he became a research assistant at Harvard University's psycho-acoustics laboratory and became the principal investigator in 1949. Bekesy, who started teaching at the Department of Sensory Science at the University of Hawaii in 1966, died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on June 13, 1972.

He was elected a member of the American National Academy of Sciences in 1956, and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1961, becoming the first physicist to receive an award in this field.

Although studies on the structure of the inner ear and the physiology of hearing began in the 17th century, the first of the most important hearing theories was developed by von Helmholtz in the 19th century. According to this theory, each of the crossed nerve endings on the basement membrane in the cochlea of the inner ear is tuned to a different frequency. Therefore, a certain nerve ending reacts to a sound of a certain frequency and ensures that the stimulus related to that sound is transmitted to the brain.

Later theorists suggested that incoming sound waves vibrate the eardrum entirely, not locally. Also, a matter of debate was the way sound waves affect the nerve endings in the membrane. While one view attributed the vibrations created by sound waves on the eardrum to standing waves of the type observed in the vibration of a wire with two fixed ends, an opposing view suggested that these vibrations resulted from waves traveling along the membrane.

Bekesy, who worked in the research laboratory of the Hungarian Telephone Administration in 1923 and dealt with telecommunication problems such as the transmission of sound over distance, became interested in hearing at that time. He first concentrated his studies on the structure of the snail and made a mechanical model of this inner ear organ in the 1940s. In this model, which consists of a rubber membrane stretched over a metal frame, he managed to reflect the variable flexibility of the basement membrane in the snail by changing the thickness of the rubber from place to place. Thus, by creating an environment to study hearing outside the ear, Bekesy had the opportunity to investigate in detail how the vibrations coming to the eardrum affect the snail fluid and to test theories about the function of the snail membrane.

Bekesy then set out to make a more realistic model of the snail, which is about 30 mm long in humans. In the end, a model emerged consisting of a water-filled plastic tube and a membrane of approximately 30 cm, which could respond to a sound width of two octaves. The most important difference of this model from the human ear was the absence of nerve fibers. Bekesy thought that the sensory nerves in his own arm could detect vibrations, and his experiments confirmed this expectation. Although a sound wave at a fixed frequency affected the water inside the model and created a wave traveling along the membrane, it could only be detected in a 2-3 cm area of Bekesy's arm. In the case of low-frequency sounds, the perceived part was directed toward the end of the cochlea, and when the frequency increased, it shifted in the opposite direction. As a result of these observations, he concluded that the basement membrane of the snail acts as a neuromechanical analyzer.

In his nearly fifty years of research, Bekesy has examined all stages of the process of turning sound into neural transmission, with a wide research program ranging from the role of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup bones in the middle ear in the transmission of sound to the inner ear, to the properties of the Corti organ, which contains the nerve cells in the inner ear. He also contributed to clinical practices in this field with his studies on the diagnosis and healing methods of hard of hearing and deafness. In particular, a new audiometer device he developed in 1946 allowed the person to adjust their hearing thresholds, frequency, and loudness of the sound according to themselves. This device, which allows hearing thresholds to be obtained in the form of a chart, has facilitated basic research as well as clinical use, and similar devices have been used in various fields, especially in determining visual thresholds.