In 1969, Steve Orfield was a recent college graduate. He went to work as a salesman in the office furniture industry. At the time, cubicles were becoming popular, as companies sought to divide up office space to give workers more privacy.
Orfield was tasked with selling one such cubicle, which was advertised as being completely soundproof. A person on the outside would not be able to hear someone inside talking on the phone or making other noises.
The quest to build truly soundproof rooms had been going on since the 1960s.
But it was all just a marketing ploy. The cubicle did not work. The designers did not know why it failed, and neither did the manufacturer. Orfield quit his job, and a few years later, he found himself building a laboratory in Minneapolis.
Inside Orfield Laboratories at Brigham Young University in Utah is a room billed as the quietest on Earth. Orfield has succeeded in creating a room that absorbs all sound that enters it.
Steve Orfield stands in the anechoic chamber he built, which is considered the quietest room on Earth.
But the treasure that Orfield had created was not something he could sell, so he turned it into a multidisciplinary research center where all sorts of experiments involving subtle sounds can be conducted.
Companies bring their products here to test how much noise they make. And NASA sends astronauts here to help them acclimate to the silence of space.
What's It Like Inside the World's Quietest Room?
The room is called an anechoic chamber, from the Latin "anechoic," meaning "no echo" or "without reverberation." It is essentially a room inside a room inside a room.
The walls, floor, and ceiling are lined with fiberglass wedges that look like foam rubber, some of them nearly four feet thick. Then, each of the six surfaces of the room is covered with steel panels that are four inches thick. Finally, there is a foot of concrete on the outside.
Orfield says that in the quietest rooms you might normally enter, such as a bedroom, the ambient sound level might be down to about 30 decibels. But in the Orfield Laboratories anechoic chamber, the average sound level is -13 decibels. That means sound waves in the room are below the threshold of human hearing.
This anechoic chamber is, by far, the quietest place on Earth. And there are strange stories about what it's like to be in it. People say you can't stand up straight in there. When the lights are turned off and there is no sound at all, you lose your sense of direction and become dizzy and nauseous.
When there is no sound, all you can hear is your own body.
Some people believe that you can actually go crazy in the room because silence can be a form of torture. When there is no outside auditory input, all you can hear is your own body. You can hear your clothes rustling, your saliva gurgling, your breath, your heartbeat, and even your blood flowing in your brain.
Can you really go crazy after 45 minutes in the quietest room on Earth?