Jules Antoine Lissajous was born on March 4, 1822 in Versailles, France. Lissajous was a French physicist who was very interested in vibrations. He wanted to be able to see these waves that were created by vibrations, usually expressed in the form of sound.

In his quest to first see these waves, he studied the ripples that were caused when he put a tuning fork in water. His later experiments (in 1855) were more famous and involved light, and mirrors. In these experiments, for example, he would put a tuning fork near a mirror and shine light onto it (these experiments dealt with acoustic waves). When the light was reflected off the first mirror, and a series of many other mirrors, the light was reflected onto a screen where he could see the wave patterns that belonged to the tuning fork, moving in time with the tuning fork. Thus he saw...