Measuring the Wave Speed on a Wave Demonstrator

With information about travel time and distance, the wave speed on a 0.90 m short-rod wave demonstrator can be calculated.

Discussion

You can use a stopwatch to measure the elapsed time (start timing at the moment the pulse is generated and leaves one end of the demonstrator and stop timing after the pulse has traveled one or more lengths of the demonstrator) and distance traveled by a wave pulse (in multiples of the length of the demonstrator, 0.90 m) to find the wave speed. The wave speed (about 1.38 m/s for this short-rod wave demonstrator) is the ratio of total distance traveled to total time elapsed.