DAMPA_75_years_of_quiet_design_ENG - Flipbook - Page 24
Where quiet
begins
Half-a-century later in Denmark, a youthful engineer and
inventor, Jean Arnold Fischer, who recently had become an
employee of Det Fyenske Trælastkompagni (The Funen
Timber Goods Company) in Odense, set about designing
acoustic panels for mass production. Fischer’s idea of using
hardboard (compressed wood fibre sheet) to make very thin
and light-weight panels, perforated with tiny holes to break
up the surface while enlarging the absorptive area, was both
practical and prescient.
The building supply trade was a good market sector to be
entering at that time because the ensuing years would witness a boom in the construction of large public buildings,
such as schools, hospitals and commercial premises. Typically, their internal spaces were rectilinear and with hard finishes for ease of cleaning – perfect for noise to reverberate.
To find a suitable promotional brand for the panels, a competition was held among Det Fyenske Trælastkompagni’s
employees, the winner being Lange Nielsen, who was the
son of one of the directors. His suggestion was derived from
the Danish expression ‘dæmp af’, which means ‘to dampen’. By dropping the ‘f’ (which is silent when pronouncing
‘af’ in Danish), this became ‘Dæmpa’ – the title under which
tiles were marketed during the first four decades of production.
(In 1983, the name was altered to ‘DAMPA’ as part of an
internationalisation strategy because the Danish letter ‘æ’
was strange to many overseas customers).
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