Wallace Clement Sabine (June 13, 1868 – January 10, 1919) was an American physicist who founded the field of architectural acoustics. Sabine was the architectural acoustician of Boston's Symphony Hall, widely considered one of the two or three best concert halls in the world for its acoustics. Early life Wallace Clement Sabine was born on June 13, 1868, in Richwood, Ohio. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Ohio State University in 1886 at the age of 18. He then attended Harvard University and graduated with a Master of Arts in 1888. His sister was Annie W. S. Siebert. Career After graduating, Sabine became an assistant professor of physics at Harvard in 1889. He became an instructor in 1890 and a member of the faculty in 1892. In 1895, he became an assistant professor and in 1905, he was promoted to professor of physics. In October 1906, he became dean of the Lawrence Scientific School, succeeding Nathaniel Shaler. Sabine's career is the story of the birth of the field of modern architectural acoustics. In 1895, acoustically improving the Fogg Lecture Hall, part of the recently constructed Fogg Art Museum, was considered an impossible task by the senior staff of the physics department at Harvard. (The original Fogg Museum was designed by Richard Morris Hunt and constructed in 1893. After the completion of the present Fogg Museum the building was repurposed for academic use and renamed Hunt Hall in 1935.) The assignment was passed down until it landed on the shoulders of a young physics professor, Sabine. Although considered a popular lecturer by the students, Sabine had never received his PhD and did not have any particular background dealing with sound. Sabine tackled the problem by trying to determine what made the Fogg Lecture Hall different from other, acoustically acceptable facilities. In particular, the Sanders Theater was considered acoustically excellent. For the next several years, Sabine and his assistants spent each night moving materials between the two lecture halls and testing the acoustics. On some nights they would borrow hundreds of seat cushions from the Sanders Theater. Using an organ pipe and a stopwatch, Sabine performed thousands of careful measurements (though inaccurate by present standards) of the time required for different frequencies of sounds to decay to inaudibility in the presence of the different materials. He tested reverberation time with several different types of Oriental rugs inside Fogg Lecture Hall,