Georg von Békésy

Georg von Békésy (1899 to 1972) was a Hungarian-American biophysicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1961 for his research on the function of the cochlea. Using strobe photography and silver flakes as a marker, he observed that the basilar membrane moves like a surface wave when stimulated by sound, with different frequencies producing maximum amplitude at different places along the cochlea. Born in Budapest, he worked for the Hungarian Post Office from 1923 to 1946, left Hungary in 1946 for the Karolinska Institute, moved to the United States in 1947 to work at Harvard University until 1966, and then became a professor at the University of Hawaii, where he died in 1972. His inner ear theory was later disproved, since frequency analysis in the mammalian ear does not rely on a traveling wave.