Fair Warning

I don’t want to alarm you, but this is going to be about alarms, and ways of giving them. Let’s start with our culture’s most famous false alarm: The Boy Who Cried “Wolf!” The moral is clear: If you make false alarms, people may not believe it when you have a real one. 

But notice that this warning was given by the most ancient method known to man: his own voice. Before other instruments were developed, it was the human vocal apparatus people had to rely on. In Homer’s Iliad, we learn of Stentor, whose voice was as powerful as those of 50 other warriors. It is from him that we derive the word “Stentorian.”

At some point, it was discovered that an even louder noise could be made by blowing into the (detached) horns of various animals, particularly the ram. In the Biblical story of Joshua, we’re told how the city of Jericho was besieged by the Hebrews, who received divine instructions to march seven times around its walls, while blowing their rams’ horns – which they did – whereupon the walls fell down. 

To this day, the blowing of such a horn (a “Shofar”) is a part of various Jewish religious ceremonies. And, of course, the horn itself has evolved into a wide variety of instruments, from trumpets to tubas. In particular, connection with alarms, as in alarm-clocks, naturally the bugle comes to mind, which has indeed been used for many centuries to wake soldiers up. Irving Berlin wrote a song about military life in World War I, which included the line: “For the hardest blow of all is to hear the bugler call,” and expressed a desire to “amputate his reveille, and step upon it heavily – And spend the rest of my life in bed.”

Apparently, by the time it reached Britain, the song had been cleansed of that vulgar surgical image, for the version I learned from my father (who had served in that war) said instead, “then I’ll get that other pup – the guy who wakes the bugler up.”

Of course, there are also foghorns. And we must acknowledge the horn’s chief modern manifestation: the automobile horn, known in some of its various incarnations as a “Klaxon” or “hooter.”

But enough of horns – what about drums? They may be even older, going back to animals which beat their chests. And, fans of jungle movies know that drums, unlike bugles, can be used to communicate relatively complex messages – and their sound can travel, or be relayed, over long distances.

Of course, warnings can be given not only by sound, but also by sight. In particular, there’s the signal-fire, which developed, even in ancient times, into a sophisticated lighthouse, like the most famous one, the Pharos at Alexandria, a huge structure considered one of the Wonders of the World. Its light emanated from a furnace kept constantly burning at the top.

And where there’s fire, there is (usually) smoke – and smoke signals have been in use for ages, not only for regular communication, but also to indicate distress in emergencies. Then there are special uses, such as that by the Roman College of Cardinals to indicate (by white smoke instead of black) when they have successfully chosen a new pope.

Fire and smoke inevitably bring us to firearms – which, apart from weaponry, have had many ceremonial applications, including the well-known 21-gun salute, and the marking of time, as in the “noon-day guns” which are still fired, presumably punctually, at a number of places around the world, including Cape Town, Hong Kong, and Malta. 

As Noel Coward put it in his epic “Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out In The Mid-day Sun”: 

In Hong Kong they strike a gong and fire off a noonday gun, 
To reprimand each inmate who’s in late.

But I have left for last the instrument whose sound has traditionally been associated not only with alarms, mourning, and marking of time, but also with celebration and festivities: BELLS.

On our first visit to China, in the 1970s, Dorothy and I started in Beijing, where our hotel room overlooked a main street. Early the first morning, I was woken by an unfamiliar sound. It turned out to be the noise of traffic – dense masses of people going to work. But what woke me was not the roar of motors or the honking of cars (then still very few). My latest waker-upper was the jingling of thousands of bicycle bells!