The electric klaxon horn was a divisive fixture of the urban soundscape in the early automotive era. (Photographer: National Motor Museum/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
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.
Source: UVA Press
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.
Traffic lights and street signs were rare in the early 1900s, and cars didn’t have turn signals. So the main ways of signaling were acoustic rather than visual, right?
Yes. When you turned a corner, you would honk your horn. When you backed up, you would honk your horn. When you did anything, you would honk your horn. There was this discipline of having to honk constantly, with the idea being that if you let people know you’re coming, that will cause safety. In many places you would actually get fined if you
didn’t honk at an intersection.
In the early 1900s, companies were still trying to figure out what kind of signaling or warning sound would be representational for cars. There were all these devices that made noise in different ways. The klaxon was marketed as a device that was so loud and distinctive that its “aaOOgah” would cut through the surrounding clamor. And it had new electric technology that provided an instantaneous signal, so you could immediately honk if you wanted to.
You noted that a klaxon in the 1920s reached 100 decibels, which is easily loud enough to cause hearing loss. Was that volume normal for klaxons?
The earlier ones were even louder, with a steel brush instead of a cog wheel on a steel diaphragm. It’s just crazy how loud they were.
An early Edison electric delivery van parked outside a Klaxon Company store in London in 1912. The horn’s piercing sound inspired one early slogan: “The X-Ray of Sound.” (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
There were other kinds of sound devices that were quieter and less expensive, so why did so many drivers buy klaxons?
I think showing off was the main reason, especially at first. You had to be rich to own a car at the time, and people wanted to demonstrate that they had the latest technology. Every time you hit that button, you’re signaling something about yourself, saying to the world “I have a car, and here I come.” It’s sort of like people now riding Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
Vehicle speed was also a factor, because the klaxon could clear a street. There was a sense of “I don’t have to slow down, because I’ve got the biggest horn on the market.”
What did urban residents and pedestrians think about the klaxon?
There was a ton of pushback, especially from anti-noise organizations. That’s why the klaxon manufacturer had to use modern advertising to reframe the noise. Instead of thinking, “Oh, my God, that’s a horrible thing I’m hearing,” they wanted people to think, “That’s what’s going to keep you safe.”
Pre-World War I ads would associate the klaxon with not killing others with your car. So you have a moral choice to make as a consumer of technology: Do you choose this klaxon that may be noisy but saves lives, or do you just run them over? The advertising gives people a rationale and a comfort to fall back on: “I’m not just obnoxious. This is the safest horn on the market.” The klaxon lets you have your cake and eat it too: You can never slow down, and the kids will just clear out so you won’t hit them.
Were the klaxon’s safety claims a kind of fig leaf for self-interest among drivers and car companies?
Yes. It was about trying to reframe the nature of that noise.
That seems consistent with Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic, which delves into ways that the auto industry in the 1920s used safety as a justification for building crosswalks, creating the “crime” of jaywalking, and redirecting child play out of streets and into playgrounds — all with the goal of speeding up urban traffic.
Absolutely. The rise of the klaxon helped reengineer cities to be places for cars, rather than shared spaces. Pedestrians are the ones who were supposed to be getting out of the way.
A Model A Ford roadster from the 1920s shows off its chromed klaxon. (Photographer: Bob D'Olivo/The Enthusiast Network via Getty Images/Getty Images)
That’s one of the big differences between cities in the 19th century and today. Back then, streets saw all different types of things moving in different ways: People, horses, streetcars and carts had to share that space. Little by little, streets have become reserved for cars. Now, if you’re in the street and you get hit, well, that’s your fault.
The klaxon’s safety-oriented marketing strategy makes me think about today’s autonomous vehicle companies that claim they are motivated by a desire to reduce crashes, even though there are lots of cheaper, more reliable ways to do that.
Sure. Autonomous driving is a technology that nobody really needs, provided with a veneer of safety. Pretty much anything that Elon Musk is trying to sell you, I’d say grab your wallet.
Well, that assumes Tesla offers autonomous driving, which is a whole other question.
True.
Let’s get back to the klaxons. In your book, you described how they became ubiquitous in the 1910s but went into decline after World War I, with many cities banning them. You offer several reasons, including noise sensitivity among shell-shocked veterans, annoyance to urban residents and the emergence of innovations like traffic lights and stop signs that enable visual instead of auditory signaling. Were other cultural factors coming into play, too?
One of the social contracts of everyday life in modernity is that you’re going to go to work nine to five, and then you get to go home and have some leisure time and repose. Governments were desperate to say they supported protecting the citizen’s right to be left alone.
In the 1920s, car horns were singled out as the most obnoxious thing about urban sound, and they became a political issue in campaign after campaign. In New York City, Fiorello La Guardia talked about this all the time. The klaxon became the symbol of noisy modernity and the problem that governments tried to solve. Many places banned them, and car companies stopped installing them.
A Londoner installs a klaxon on a rooftop during World War II. The device’s piercing cry remained useful as a warning signal long after their role as car horns ended. (Photographer: Horace Abrahams/Hulton Archive via Getty Images)
Even without the klaxon, there still seems to be a tension between the individual and societal impact of horn usage. Where I live in Washington, DC, I hear horns all the time, including when people are greeting one another or trying to tell someone to hurry up. In those situations, the horn-blowing isn’t about safety; it’s about driver convenience. And it can be very annoying to those nearby — or at least to me.
Funny, in the 1920s taxis in New York, Paris and Madrid did exactly that. If you were a cab driver and you came to pick someone up, you started whaling on your horn. There were a whole bunch of laws that came on the books to stop that from happening.
The tensions you describe haven’t gone away, but I think that their extent is less than a century ago. You can listen to old recordings of streetscapes in the 1930s, and drivers in the city are just honking constantly. Now it’s not such a ubiquitous background sound.
I’m curious about car alarms, which are another kind of auditory pollution from cars. Horns can be annoying to those outside the vehicle, but they also benefit them by preventing collisions. With a car alarm, all the upside — assuming there is any — seems to accrue to the vehicle owner who theoretically avoids a theft, while the impact of that alarm on everyone else is entirely negative.
Yeah, I agree. It’s actually even worse, because the annoyance of a sound relates to its duration as well as volume, and car alarms can go on and on. A hundred years ago, makers of the klaxon were very interested in the duration of the sound. They were trying to get klaxon owners to use what they called a “tiger growl,” which just a short tap on the device so it sounds like “aa” instead of the full “aaOOgah.”
What should the car horns of the future sound like?
The same as they do now. From a social engineering point of view, you want car sounds to be identifiable as car sounds. Horns haven’t changed much since the late 1920s. I think sticking with what people recognize through cultural training is the most the most logical way to go. Having some new sound would probably confuse people.
Does that apply to car engine sounds too, given that electric cars at low speeds can be nearly silent?
I don’t think we want electric cars to be silent. When I hear a car coming, I look in its direction immediately. That’s what we do when we’re negotiating space and identifying potential threats. That’s kind of how we’re hardwired: You need to hear the tiger coming, even in your sleep, right? So for safety’s sake, I think that silent cars wouldn’t be a good thing. Nor do we want electric cars to sound wacky, with
fart noises and such.
A sign urges drivers to avoid honking on a street in Pondicherry, India. (Photographer: Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis News)
How have we acclimatized ourselves to urban car noises over time?
We have a consumer technology approach to solving the problem of car noise. People can walk around with noise-canceling headphones or buy a quiet car or get special windows that don’t let sound in. It’s a kind of acoustic cocooning. If you have beef with the noise, well, you don’t have the right app or the right product.
Sounds like you think that’s bad. Why?
It’s a consumer technology-driven argument about how to solve a societal problem.
If I’m taking a walk and a car comes up on me that’s roaring, there’s a startle response. It’s hard not to be angry at somebody who is making that imposition. The more we realize that the car sounds we make have an impact on other people, the more ethical we are as people. Having that conversation is a better conversation than just saying, “Well, get a car that keeps out outside noise” or “get double-paned windows.” I’d like to see a discourse where we talk about our relationship to one another, and the fact that we’re part of a community that we want to make more livable.
If someone on the street is crying and I have my headphones on, I don’t have to pay attention to them. I can keep my environment entirely controlled. If we train ourselves to think that it’s unreasonable to hear anybody else’s sound, and that the only proper approach is to mitigate the noise, then we don’t really have to listen to each other. We miss out on learning from one another.
Are you saying that car noises erode civil society?
I think so. If you have a big muscle car or you remove the muffler or install enormous tailpipes, that’s a conscious choice you’re making. You like the fact that you’re calling attention to yourself. It’s analogous to the early days of the klaxon, because you’re saying, “Get out of my way,” as opposed to, “Excuse me.” I’d like there to be more of a conversation about the fact that we have an obligation to avoid offending other people.