Calling attention to sirens
Sirens wail in the night and people snug in warm beds know they mean trouble. But sirens no longer speak a common language. They beep, chirrup, squeal, rage, and howl in a cacophony of warning noise unlike the steady wail of chrome-plated sirens that vanished in the 1960s.
In ancient Greek mythology, people feared the lesser gods that warned of impending death, lured mariners to destruction, and ripped souls from those killed by deafening. In "The Odyssey," Circe warns Odysseus to block the ears of his crew with wax, and to lash himself to the mast, so he alone could hear the wailing sirens on shore. The stratagem worked. Captain and crew avoided the rocks and the bone heaps of drowned seamen who followed the wailing and drowned. After 1800, artists often rendered the sirens as beautiful women or seductive mermaids, but the ancient Greeks envisioned them as gigantic birds with the heads and chests of women. Prettying-up classical myth nonetheless leaves younger readers wondering why hideous wailing attracted ancient Greeks. Perhaps human nature does not change. People are drawn to trouble, even the sound of it.
In 1867, the first steam-powered fog siren began wailing on Sandy Hook, N.J., to warn ships approaching New York harbor. Inside the throat of a long, large horn rotated a slatted cylinder: steam exhausted from the end of the horn to make an ear-splitting noise. By 1900, one Rhode Island newspaper called steam-powered fog sirens the greatest nuisance in the history of the state. Adverse health effects were noted by abutters, especially farmers who discovered that fog-siren vibrations killed unhatched baby chicks.
Lower-toned fog horns soon replaced most of the sirens. Invented by an amateur organ-maker and sold to the Wurlitzer Organ Co., the so-called diaphone tone generator could be set to produce easily recognized tones.
World War I created a frantic demand for community-wide systems to warn of air raid or invasion. It was an era when some families still lacked telephones, some people already drove around in cars (but radio had not been perfected) and factories produced all sorts of noise. So sirens struck authorities as the only solution. Sterling Siren of Rochester, N.Y., had begun producing hand sirens as early as 1905, largely to warn groups of people in factories and elsewhere of fire or other emergency. Air raid wardens soon carried the sirens, and they appeared on the tops of tall buildings in cities. But after the war ended, authorities focused on sirens as fire-fighting tools.
Well into the 1960s, south-of-Boston towns used firehouse-mounted sirens to summon volunteers. The men earned small sums for answering the siren's call, reading the message on the firehouse board, and driving engines and personal vehicles to fires.
World War II had redirected civil defense authorities toward the worsening problem of alerting people inside noisy environments. The Klaxon Co. in England had already invented the two-tone siren that warned submariners of impending dives. But the Chrysler Corp. built gigantic sirens, powered by a 140-horsepower, eight-cylinder engine, audible almost 50 miles away. The wartime sirens were twice as loud as a modern jet fighter engine on takeoff.
Smaller sirens worked in the region until towns began dispatching call firefighters by radio. When towns converted to full-time fire departments, sirens fell silent, but many remain part of a civil-defense system. Like the pole-mounted sirens in the vicinity of
Until the middle 1960s, smaller sirens stood atop fire engine front fenders. Turned by electric motors, they emitted a steady wail. Within 10 years, electronic sirens had replaced most of the chrome-plated mechanical ones. Mounted above fire-engine cabs or behind the radiator grills of police cruisers, the small devices emitted random or patterned changes of tone, often at a pitch high enough to warn even those motorists driving noise-insulated, air conditioned, stereo-equipped vehicles.
But as 19th-century Rhode Islander farmers discovered, a blaring siren can be unhealthy. Standing near a World War II or tsunami warning siren can result in deafness, blurred vision, and dizziness. The crew of a fire engine responding to an emergency must often endure a siren as loud in the cab of their vehicle as it is just in front of it. So-called cab-over-engine fire trucks subject crews to appalling siren noise, especially if the siren sits atop the cab, between the warning lights. But even placing the siren above the front bumper or inside the grill of a police car diminishes operator-heard sound only slightly.
Canadian experts now experiment with electronic sirens fitted in the throats of horns whose shape makes historians think of smaller versions of the Sandy Hook steam siren. Using stereo technology, the experts have created sirens that produce a cone of intense wail just ahead of a fire engine, and greatly lessen the noise inside the vehicle.
Nowadays when firefighters and police approach jammed intersections they sound massive air horns along with sirens. Horns and sirens clear a path once cleared by bells and whistles, but they attract people, too, making the task of first responders ever more difficult.
Norwell resident John Stilgoe is Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard University.
