Ahh-OOO-gah !!! A Loud Warning From the Past About Living With Cars
Just like there are certain things you can’t unsee after you’ve seen them, there are certain sounds you can’t unhear. Take for instance, the Klaxon horn.
Click here for the sound of the Klaxon horn.
David Zipper, writing for Bloomberg, said that “Klaxon automotive horns, once standard safety equipment, disappeared from the roads after World War I. But the tensions they exposed about urban noise still echo.”
Some 110 years ago, an ear-splitting noise ricocheted across North America and Europe. Its sound: “aaaOOgah!!”
That distinctive metallic screech was emitted by a klaxon, a mechanical horn powered by electricity, then a captivating recent innovation. The klaxon filled a niche in the early 1900s, a time when street signage was minimal, driving rules were nascent, and mass adoption of the turn signal was still decades away. Simply by pressing a klaxon’s button, a driver could declare their intention to go right or left, alert pedestrians, or send a warning when approaching a blind curve. Alternatively, they could do it simply for fun.
Inventor and electrical engineer Miller Reese Hutchinson devised the machine, seeking an automotive signal powerful enough to pierce the din of 20th century cities. Entrepreneur F. Hallett Lovell purchased the patent in 1908, vowing to become “a merchant of racket” and giving the klaxon its memorable brand name — derived, he said, from the Greek klaxo, to shriek. Lovell’s firm was sold to General Motors in 1915, and the klaxon and its rivals became standard equipment on new automobiles worldwide.
The Klaxon Company advertised the product as a safety device, but many people saw it as a loathsome creation that frazzled nerves and sullied urban life. After World War I — which saw klaxons used as gas alarms in the trenches of Europe — a growing number of public leaders took their side, passing laws restricting klaxon use and sometimes banning them outright. By the 1940s, the klaxon had been supplanted by other, less aggressive car horns. But the tensions it revealed — between cars and urban livability, and between the freedoms to use new automotive technology and to be protected from its ill effects — still reverberate in debates around autonomous vehicles, noise cameras and what to do about obnoxiously loud drivers.
Pennsylvania State University communications professor Matthew F. Jordan tells the story of the klaxon’s rise and fall in his latest book, Danger Sound Klaxon!: The Horn That Changed History. Its title — which won an award for the oddest in the publishing industry last year — is taken from the signs that were once common on roadways. Jordan writes: “The cultural reaction formation witnessed in relation to the klaxon — the first great technological application that promised to solve the safety problems related to an automobile-centered world — has continued, though the sound it once made is now only a spectral signal slowly fading from memory.”
Bloomberg CityLab contributor David Zipper spoke with Jordan about this pioneering automotive device, as well as the ongoing conflicts between the preferences of car owners and the well-being of urban residents. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
If we could time travel to a major American city in 1900, the dawn of the automotive era, what would it sound like?
Even without cars, there were plenty of other sounds that always made people complain in cities. It wasn’t quiet by any stretch of the imagination.
The primary vehicles at that time were streetcars along with horses, which had their own signaling devices on them, like carriage bells. Also, the roads were a lot less smooth around the turn of the century, so things were clanging on the pavement. That was an era where there were a lot of steam engines, a lot of urban construction, with industrial noise reaching its apex in the 1920s.
In your book, you note that in the early 1900s many people thought cars would make cities quieter. Today, that seems crazy. Why did it make sense then?
At the time cars didn’t have a consistent sound of their own per se, like a horse-drawn carriage that goes clip-clop or a train where you could hear the engine. Cars were comparatively silent then, which is so anathema to our thinking now.
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