Paul Earls Sabine

Paul Earls Sabine (22 January 1879 – 28 December 1958) was an American acoustic engineer and a specialist on acoustic architecture. Sound absorbing boards made of porous gypsum was sometimes known by the tradename Sabinite. He was a director at the Riverbank Laboratories until his retirement in 1947.

Sabine was born in Albion, Illinois, to Methodist pastor Charles and Rebecca Likely née McClure.[1] He was educated at McKendree College (1899) before going to Harvard University from where he received a doctorate in 1915. He taught physics for a while and in 1919 he replaced his cousin Wallace Clement Sabine (who died from cancer) as director of the Riverbank Acoustical Laboratories (which later became a part of the Illinois Institute of Technology). He developed the work of his cousin and specialized in acoustic architecture and was a consultant for architects and involved in the design of the Radio City Music Hall, New York; Fels Planetarium, Philadelphia; and the House and Senate Chambers. He established relationships between total sound absorption,[2] reverberation and the absorptive properties of materials while also innovating measurement,[3] standards, and absorptive materials.[4][5][6][7][8] A porous gypsum plaster to line walls and meant to absorb sounds was developed in 1924 by the Keasbey Mattison laboratories and marketed as Sabinite.[9] During World War II he worked at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory. After his retirement in 1947 he moved to Colorado Springs and spent a lot of time on Christianity and its relationship to science which he wrote about in Atoms, Men and God (1953). He published the landmark book Acoustics and Architecture (1932).[10] His son Hale Johnson Sabine (1909-1981) also became an acoustics specialist.[11][12]