20 Everyday Sounds In History That Disappeared Without Us Noticing

Mary Smith worked as a “knocker-up,” or a human alarm clock, in 1930s East London. She would fire dried peas through a pea-shooter at the windows of people living on upper floors, waking workers in time for their shifts. And yes, people actually paid a few pence a week for this wake-up call! Alarm clocks were still expensive and unreliable, so many mines and factories employed knocker-ups instead, with isolated mining communities in northern England keeping the trade alive into the early 1970s. Early alarm clocks were also prone to stopping, so paying a human to knock was often the more dependable option.

German chemists Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke invented Blitzlicht in 1887. This consisted of a chemical mixture that included magnesium powder and potassium chlorate, and was ignited on an open metal tray. Blitzlicht produced a big bang (literally) and a burst of light indoors, along with thick white smoke. Open trays gave way to flashbulbs, which were enclosed in glass, in the 1930s.

From the 1880s through the 1950s, National Cash Register manufactured mechanical registers that really did cha-ching each time they were used. Turning the crank or pushing down on the levers (keys) turned sets of brass gears inside the machine. This, in turn, made the price indicators pop up, a wooden drawer pop out, and a small hammer hit a gong.

From the medieval era into the 19th century, town criers, with their brass bells and cries of Oyez, Oyez, Oyez (Old French for Hear ye), announced proclamations, court decisions, and other news, serving as the local news source for city dwellers who couldn’t read. The role of a town crier became a ceremonial position by the early 1900s.

Between the 1880s and 1950s, picking up the telephone meant hearing an operator’s voice ask, “Number, please?” The rest was her job. To connect your call, she pushed brass-tipped patch cords into jacks on a wooden switchboard, producing a series of clicks, metallic snaps, and dropping shutters. All that just to get one person on the phone! Eventually, the job of routing calls went to the electromechanical Strowger switch.

Between the 1880s and 1940s, icemen delivered blocks of ice weighing between 25 and 50 pounds to keep household iceboxes cold. Using heavy iron tongs, workers placed the ice in the tin-lined top of wooden iceboxes, which were gradually replaced by electric Freon refrigerators in the 1930s and 1940s. The scraping and heavy thud of each block being loaded became a familiar sound along the delivery route. Not exactly the quietest way to keep your food cold!

Unlike the fixed-pitch compressed-air horns of later diesel-electric trains, steam locomotive whistles could actually change pitch. From the 1830s through the dieselization era of 1945 to 1960, an engineer could pull the whistle cord to adjust the pressure of steam blowing through multi-chambered chime whistles and alter their sound. This process, known as quilling, let the whistle bend and swell in pitch over the throb of locomotive chug-chug-chugs. Trains had a little more musical range back then!

From the 19th century into the 1950s, traveling knife sharpeners made their rounds through neighborhoods, ringing handbells to let residents know they were available for work. Once someone brought out a knife, the shrill grinding stone, propelled by a foot treadle, sent sparks flying with every pass of the carbon-steel blade. You certainly would’ve heard the knife sharpener coming! In Italian communities, these traveling sharpeners were called arrotini.

Telegraph messages didn’t come through as the beeps and tones we often associate with Morse code today. Instead, brass electromagnetic sounders had little metal levers that clacked against an iron anvil, creating the rhythmic click-clack patterns of Morse code. From the 1840s into the 1950s, operators at train stations and Western Union offices learned to understand entire messages just by listening to those clicks.

When homes were heated with coal, delivery trucks would back up to a cellar hatch and send tons of coal sliding down a steel chute into a basement bin. The rumble could shake the entire house. Talk about knowing exactly when your delivery had arrived! Coal delivery continued this way into the 1950s, until the advent of natural gas and oil furnaces put an end to it.

Until 1948, when vinyl LPs were introduced, records were 78 rpm discs made of brittle shellac. From the 1890s to the 1940s, they were played on hand-cranked Victor Talking Machines and similar machines powered by a steel mainspring. As a steel needle traveled along the record’s grooves, the music came with plenty of surface noise: hisses, pops, and scratches. A perfectly clean listening experience this was not! The needle also wore down quickly and had to be replaced regularly.

In the 1890s and into the 1950s, motormen had a foot pedal they’d use to warn pedestrians. Pressing the pedal would cause a striker to strike a big brass gong under the streetcar, emitting the classic “ding-ding.” Postwar, cities gradually pulled tracks to make way for diesel buses.

From the 1920s until the late 1960s, the Western Electric Model 500 or its equivalents were the standard telephone. Dialing was done by spinning the numbered wheel until your number hit the metal stop, then releasing. A spring governed the spinning, and as it spun back, it sent accurate pulses to the other side on the wire. But this was all made obsolete once Touch-Tone buttons came out in 1963.

From the early 1800s to the 1930s and ’40s, lamplighters followed set evening routes. They carried an elongated brass torch pole to light the lamps. Each time the lamplighter opened the valve key, he ignited the mantle with a soft pop followed by a quiet hissing that continued all night. One by one, each light was lit by hand until the process was superseded by municipal electric lighting.

From the 1920s into the mid-1950s, vacuum tube radios had their own ritual. When you turned them on, they hummed at low power while the glass valves warmed up. Then you’d rotate that heavy dial, listen through zippy heterodyne squeals and bursts of static until you found your station. All of that went away when the solid-state transistor radio came along starting in 1954.

In 1923, Wilhelm Ritzerfeld invented a machine called a spirit duplicator, or Ditto machine, which was used to make copies of documents. A master copy was attached to a drum, which the operator manually cranked. An alcohol solvent transferred waxy purple dye from the master onto sheets of paper. Operating the machine made a rhythmic chunk-whir-clack sound and filled the room with a faintly sweet, chemical smell. Photocopying was a much more sensory experience back then!

In department stores and banks, clerks loaded brass cans with money and slipped them into the wall terminals of a pneumatic system, such as those made by the Lamson Company. Motorized vacuums sucked the cans through tubes overhead and on to their destinations, and they were in constant use from the 1890s into the 1950s. The change would whoosh back moments later.

At their peak of popularity between 1900 and 1929, player pianos worked by a system of vacuum bellows pumped by foot pedals. Suction from these bellows would draw a perforated paper roll along a metal tracker bar, and the resulting air would activate the hammers and strings. But as families began replacing their player pianos in favor of the free concert on the radio, sales were already declining. Then the stock market crash of 1929 finished the job.

From the 1890s to the late 1940s, wire crates containing glass milk bottles were distributed by horse-drawn carts. The iron-shod thump of hooves against cobblestone and the tinkling of glass bottles traveling down sleeping, pre-dawn streets provided a daily rhythm to morning commotions. By the 1950s, motorized delivery trucks had replaced these horse-drawn carts.

On a manual typewriter, every new line of text came with its own little sequence of sounds. As the typist typed, the carriage inched toward the right; near the margin, a mechanical trip sounded a small brass bell. Hearing the bell, the typist would yank the carriage back, and the cycle would start again: clack, clack, clack of the steel typebars striking the ink ribbon. Sure, I get a little joy out of the clickity sounds of my keyboard now, but I’d love to hear the full clack-ding-slam of a typewriter while I worked!

This content was created with the help of AI.