To have “all the bells and whistles” is to be festooned with every kind of conceivable gadget, tool, and novelty. The phrase may have originated in cartoonist Rowland Emett’s fanciful inventions depicted in the 1960’s and 70’s, or in the elaborate circus calliopes that dazzled children and drew crowds in a bygone pre-electronic era. However it remains with us even now – even when it seems that every device is expected to offer a multiplicity of functions, when even an “older generation” smartphone can send an email, give directions, remotely set a thermostat, play a song, and find the nearest restaurant. Whatever the origin of the phrase, the connotation of inessential frivolity doesn’t actually do justice to the long history of the relationship of human beings and bells, nor to the role of whistles in the fabric of ordinary life.
Humans began making metal bells around 2000 BC in China. The practice of making whistles from bone and wood is even older. The initial impulse to create sounds with these devices might have been purely aesthetic, born of the urge to make pleasurable sounds and further inspired by the sheer delight of tooting and clanging. But quickly bells and whistles were put to work, finding their way into almost every corner of human social, civic, and domestic life. Since their invention both have been used to announce and celebrate birth and death, disaster and salvation, and to accompany the rituals and ceremonies that shape cultures and form identity. They help us remember God, contemplate nothingness, and to communicate with the animals we live among in nature. Bells and whistles are our sonic familiars, accompanying us as we learn to be human, ushering us with their music into territories beyond the physical.
But we also know bells and whistles as signals of authority. The factory whistle tells adults to get to work; the school bell urges children to class; the policeman’s whistle commands traffic to stop and criminals to halt; managers hit bells to summon servants and porters; the referee’s shrill blast broadcasts a foul or time-out; and a clanging bell still marks the start of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. All of these bells and whistles function as commanding voices that suggest—even demand—a conditioned response, from a churning dread in the pit of our stomachs (oh no, time to go to work) to heart-pounding ecstasy (the race is on!). Not only do bells and whistles tell us what to do, they typically tell us to do it right now. Hop to it! And yet—as is so often the case—these very expressions of power are also used to dethrone and unmask it: Think of the whistleblower, protestor against injustice and wrongdoing, who draws his name from the very same tool of authority.
Bells and whistles are with us in our lives every single day to such an extent that sometimes we cease to see and hear them. We invite you now to take a closer look at these constant, insistent, transporting, oppressive, surprising, solemn and ethereal companions, that turn out to be anything but superfluous.