 As with optics, acoustics has a history of similar duration, again starting with the ancient Greeks.In contrast, the acousto-optic effect has had a relatively short history, beginning with Brillouin predicting the diffraction of light by an acoustic wave, being propagated in a medium of interaction, in 1922.This was then confirmed with experimentation in 1932 by Debye and Sears, and also by Lucas and Biquard.