Danger Sound Klaxon! reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one of the first great electrical consumer technologies of the twentieth century. Although its metallic shriek at first shocked pedestrians, savvy advertising strategies convinced consumers across the United States and western Europe to adopt the shrill Klaxon horn as the safest signaling technology available in the 1910s. The widespread use of Klaxons in the trenches of World War I, however, transformed how veterans heard this car horn, and its traumatic association with gas attacks ultimately doomed this once ubiquitous consumer technology. By charting the meteoric rise and eventual fall of the Klaxon, Matthew Jordan highlights how perceptions of sound-producing technologies are guided by, manipulated, and transformed through advertising strategies, public debate, consumer reactions, and governmental regulations. Jordan demonstrates in this fascinating history how consumers are led toward technological solutions for problems themselves created by technology.
Matthew F. Jordan is Associate Professor of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University.
Jordan highlights the role of the klaxon in a diverse range of historical developments in the early twentieth century, notably the disruptive arrival of the automobile, the emergence of modern traffic and noise regulation, the histories of technocracy and techno-optimism, innovations in advertising, the contested process of Americanization in Europe, and the cultural trauma experienced after World War I. . . [It] is a compelling case study of the interplay between culture, markets, and technology. With its many reproductions of klaxon advertisements, the book is also visually engaging. Above all, it is a captivating read, detailed yet accessible, and resonant in our current cultural moment in which we continue the modern tradition of elevating quick technological fixes over more systemic changes to our ways of life. -- "H-Sci-Med-Tech" A highly original study that shows how what we hear is framed by complex cultural and symbolic registers. It cuts across many different subject areas encompassing cultural studies, communications theory, the social history of technology, urban history, the history of auto-mobility, and the history of advertising to make a significant contribution to its cross-disciplinary field. --Rudy J. Koshar, University of Wisconsin, author of German Travel Cultures A welcomed and original contribution to the growing field of sound studies, Danger Sound Klaxon! shows convincingly that our modern sound perception is learned and highly culturally encoded. Jordan writes in an engaging, clear and readable style. --Stefan Krebs, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), co-author of Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel
