The Universal Beep

 

1.

“A letter was published in the Scots Magazine dated Renfrew, February 1, 1753, and signed " C. M."” proposed a machine that would employ some electrical conductor to create “the striking of a bell by the attraction of a charged ball.”

Nobody in Smollett, or Sterne, or Fielding rings an electrical doorbell. Nobody hears a phone. Nobody hears a beep. Yet during this period of picaresque plenty, this C.M. was plotting to change the world into the mass of beeping that it is today.

In the year 1831, Edgar Allan Poe was failing at West Point and writing his first tales. Meanwhile, north of West Point, an American natural philosopher and inventor was about to change the world from his perch in a school in Albany, New York, like some mad Poe hero. Joseph Henry, being impressed by the experiments with magnets and electricity performed in Europe, decided to try it out on his own. Insulating a bunch of wires in silk, which meant that he could bind more than one metal wire together in a chord, he ran lengths of wire around a classroom in Albany, New York, put a battery at one end and an electromagnet at the other end of the wire, and in a moment of fiendish inspiration, placed a steel rod and a bell near the electromagnetic end. He then sent an electrical charge through the wire, thereby ringing the bell and causing billions of innocents, 175 years later, to suffer through bells, rings, buzzes and a variety of unpleasant noises from every implement that involves, even remotely, electricity.

O the innocents of that time, out plowing in the fields, hunting the game, making up hymns or getting royally drunk in inns! Little did they know.

2.

While all this business with electricity was going on in America, in Northern Britain, another affair was afoot. I take these facts from M.B. Emanuel’s Hay fever, a post industrial revolution epidemic: a history of its growth during the 19th century (1988).

Oddly, until the nineteenth century, there were vanishingly few references in the medical literature to anything resembling pollen-caused allergy. In the 8th century A.D., a Persian doctor, Muhammad ibn Zakariya' al-Razi, wrote about a illness that came from sniffing roses, causing headache and runny nose. “Leonhardus Botallus of Pavia in 1565 referred to persons who held the smell of roses in deadly hatred because it gave rise to headache, sneezing and troublesome itching of the nose.” And there was a dude in France who referenced the Rose disease in the 17th century.

But it was not really a disease on the map until John Bostock in 1818 reported a seasonal “catarrh”, which he attributed to the rays of the sun. In 1828 he returned to this seasonal illness, writing that he had seen more of it in the past ten years. It had acquired a name – hay asthma or hay fever. But the connection between hay and the illness was still uncertain. But it was becoming fashionable:

“There is evidence that the Hanoverian monarchy suffered from allergic disease. William IV was rumoured to suffer from hay fever [21] and his brother the Duke of Sussex was flogged for having asthma as child. It is now known that childhood asthma is almost invariably of allergic origin. It is documented that William himself suffered from occasional asthmatic attacks and his death in June 1837 followed a particularly severe episode.”

It was another doctor from North Britain, Charles Blackley, who showed, via experiment, that the pollen of certain plants brought on the attack of runny nose, headache and fever. Blackley noticed something strange, though: the farming class, who had the most physical contact with pollen, seemed to have the fewest cases of hay fever.

Blackley’s observation has led to an abundance of literature on the complex ecological conditions that favour a disease or a syndrome. If this case, those most liable to the disease were, 1, in sedentary professions, and 2., outside of farming communities. But, importantly, they were also in the midst of a change in the uses of land. For farm land was disappearing under the spread of urban and suburban housing. It was not simply exposure to pollen, but the situated isolation from pollen that was important to the incidence of the disease.

3.

On December 1, 2014, the NYT had a small article entitled: When Everyday Noise becomes Unbearable. The journalist Joyce Cohen, dug up an extreme case – a man who found the “humming noise” of a refrigerator unbearable. The doctors in the article called these cases hyeracusis. In the usual medical way, they blamed loud noises, like heavy metal, which damaged the ear for smaller noises.

Indoor noises – rings, buzzes and beeps – are features of design and structure. Among people who are bothered to a greater degree than “normal” by rings, buzzes and beeps, this is a problem. I noticed, last year, when we were out shopping for a new dishwasher, refrigerator and stove, that the descriptions of the products in Darty and the other emporiums we went to all included a reference to the level of noise made by the product, helpfully illustrated by a graph which produced that pleasing, pseudocomprehension in the shopper. A visual! I was surprised. This consumer and design information was evidently responding to a need, but I had not been aware that other people were feeling the same as we were: that the noise of machines in motion in the living space can be rather annoying

I happen to be reading, while thinking about beeps and buzzes, Edward Tenner’s Why Things bite Back. This is a very affordances-centered book about the unintended consequences of technological innovation: it was published in the late nineties, when the post-Cold war fad was to question central planning under the aegis of “unintended consequences” – the Soviet Union being exhibit one.

Tenner develops a neat vocabulary to taxonomize unintended effects – for instance, the idea of revenge effects:

“Revenge effects happen because new structures, devices, and organisms

react with real people in real situations in ways we could not

foresee. There are occasional reverse revenge effects: unexpected benefits

of technology adopted for another reason. (Like revenge effects

themselves, reverse revenge effects are a rough but useful metaphor:

in one case, for the way reality seems to strike back at our efforts, and

in the other, for the equally unexpected ways in which we benefit

from the complexity of the world's mechanisms.)”

This is an insight that goes back to the Greeks and Egyptians, and is part of the cultural vocabulary of Nemesis. Although, in the 1990s, they were all pretending that we had just discovered this.

Applied to allergies, or the human geography of agriculture and industry, it is easy to see the revenge of the immune system in operation here. The human body, which is easily abstracted away from in sociology, is still the key variable, as every murder story reminds us.

In the case of hypersensitivity to noise and to light, what is interesting is that the urban environment in the developed economies – the post-industrial economies – was in many ways much noisier at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Theodor Lessing wrote his classic essay against noise and founded the anti-noise league in 1909, he was responding to a real, increased level of noise in the urban environment. John Goodyear’s essay on Lessing’s anti-noise league contains some good quotes, both from the pro-noise side and Lessing’s own colorful vocabulary of Klavierpest (the plague of pianos) and Gesangseuche (the pestilence of singing) to the various traffic noises, in which the hooting of car horns already figures.

If we were to do a complete, one thousand page book on the rise of the Universal Beep, which will happen only in the afterlife, when I have time - the hooting of car horns would have pride of place. This hooting involves the designed production of ugly noise, the ideology of safety (horns being necessary as signals to other drivers), and the collective phenomenon resulting from this. So much, as WCW could have said, depends upon the car resting in the driveway! And its sound possibilities.

This being so, the great industrial period, in which cities actually hosted giant factories and mid-range workshops, has come to an end in many countries. France and the U.S., for instance. The city is now a service node, a consumer spot, a building investment opportunity – but not a place where the terrific noises of smelting and congealing are going on.

The engineered ugly noise is now everywhere, from car alarms to fire alarms. When, during the reign of Good King Obama, we moved to Santa Monica California for a couple of years, we encountered the Cali required and always faulty fire alarm, with all its hijinx: the squack of it at one in the morning, the maddening attempt to turn it off, the replacement of the batteries, the leaving out of the batteries, etc. Burned toast or old batteries were suddenly occasions for riot.

At the moment, our universal beep problem concerns the new induction stovetop, replacing our old gas jet stove top. The beep sounds for a variety of reasons – a pot boiling over, or a pot being partly out of the induction heat circle, etc. – and we try to understand it while pressing various buttons. Its use to us is mostly in disproportion to its irritation of us.

This isn’t to say that safety features are not important – especially to the liability lawyers retained by corporations – so much as that the total gestalt of one’s living area doesn’t really figure into all these designed ugly noises. They are all shrill noises. None of them are organic – the ring or the buzz is the farthest thing from, say, the fart or the burp. They combine with changes in artificial light and changes in the ambient temperature to affect our inner organism, and our moods, and our well-being.

They are here, each buzz, ring and beep, to remind us that the machine is here. When we humans go – from disease, nuclear war, or zombie apocalypse – we will leave these beeps behind.