Abstract
The ear drum is considered to be a thin circular membrane with radial and circular fibers, whose center is pulled inwards by the handle of the hammer. It is shown that such a membrane is equivalent to a rigid piston connected by a lever to the handle of the hammer, and subjected to elastic forces. The stability of the equivalent system is great, and the flexibility of the lever is very small. The lever is such that small pressures in the auditory canal are transformed into larger forces on the hammer. The leverage ratio increases with the tension of the tensor tympani and decreases with the number of circular fibers.
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Literature
Bailey, F. R., and collaborators. 1936.Bailey's Textbook of Histology. Baltimore: William Wood and Co.
Esser, M. 1947. “The Mechanism of the Middle Ear: Part I. The Two-Piston Problem.”Bull. Math. Biophysics,9, 29–40.
Helmholtz, H. 1873.The Mechanism of the Ossicles and Membrana Tempani. New York: William Wood and Co.
Tumarkin, A. 1945. “A Contribution to the Theory of the Mechanism of the Auditory Apparatus.”Jour. of Laryngology and Otology,60, 337–368.
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Esser, M.H.M. The mechanism of the middle ear: Part II. The drum. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 9, 75–91 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478294
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478294