The amplitude of the surface elastic wave produced by the application of an alternating voltage to an interdigital arrangement of electrodes on the surface of a piezoelectric medium is determined. The electric field produced by the surface electrodes is calculated subject to the assumption that the piezoelectric coupling of the material can be neglected. This electric field acts as the forcing term for the inhomogeneous elastic equation, which is then solved to obtain the amplitude of the surface wave generated by the transducer. A reciprocal relationship between the excitation and detection problems is used to obtain the power extracted from the surface wave by an interdigital arrangement of surface electrodes. Measurements made on single crystals of quartz and cadmium sulfide are found to be in good agreement with theoretical predictions. The maximum value of the product (efficiency×fractional bandwidth) for a surface‐wave transducer is calculated. For an interdigital surface‐wave transducer on the basal plane of CdS, the maximum value of this product is found to be 7.8×10−2. It is shown that one can connect linear pairs of surface electrodes in an appropriate binary code so as to obtain high efficiency and large bandwidth transducers.