George Bernard Shaw entered a posh London restaurant, took a seat, and was confronted by the waiter. "While you are eating, sir, the orchestra will play anything you like. What would you like them to play?"
Shaw's reply? "Dominoes."
We are living in an incredibly noisy world. When I looked I found din in Madrid, where subway construction was chopping up lovely Castellan Avenue. The burghers of Frankfurt or Munich would not have been able to take their fingers out of their ears to sign my petitions; they, too, were experiencing subway construction. And no wonder Governor Rockefeller and the State of New York heard nothing unusual on Sixth Avenue: Albany was being torn down and rebuilt and its reverberating legislative halls were alive with tension and fright (but no anti-noise legislation).
B.D. Allen, chief public health inspector for Coventry, England, has warned that British cities could become "noise hells" in the immediate future. In 1966 Dr. M. G. Candau, Director-General of the World Health Organization, called urban noise a growing world-wide threat.
The theme of the July 1967 UNESCO Courier was noise pollution, and its articles were printed in English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Arabic, Japanese, and Italian.
There is no escape. It doesn't matter whether the head is under a Mexican sombrero or a Wall Street homburg, the wearer is holding his hands to his ears. Moscow's Vechernaya Moskva reports that people living near the truck depot on Khodinsky Street cannot sleep because of truck horns and a loudspeaker blaring orders. It further complains of inconsiderate citizens who play loud tape recorders all night long, start car engines at night, or drive around courtyards on noisy motorcycles.
A resident of Pretoria, South Africa, blames church clock chimes for two years of sleeplessness. And in the heart of primitive Africa, missionaries send for ear stopples to keep out the native drumming and noisy ritual dances.
When I was in London for the fifth annual meeting of the International Congress for Noise Abatement, I had to give up a cheerful bay window room because it fronted on Knightbridge Road, throbbing with buses, cars, and lorries. Later I stopped off to enjoy the peace and quiet—so I imagined—of Ireland. Dublin was no haven; I had to change rooms three times in a first-class hotel, once to escape the traffic, a second time to escape the clatter and chatter from the kitchen, and a third time to escape the roaring central exhaust fan installed in the courtyard.
That fewer and fewer people are able to escape excessive noise was further revealed in a report of the Greater London Council published in 1965. It revealed that a large proportion of the population of London, indoors, with windows slightly open, is subject to noise levels in excess of those suggested as acceptable maxima by a government-sponsored committee in 1960.
We further learn that in London there is only a brief period of quiet during the 24 hours of each day. The Greater London Council reports that though the average levels at night are much lower than by day, "the quietest period only lasts from 1:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M. Between 10:00 P.M. and midnight, when many people go to bed, and during the hour or so before they normally wake up, noise levels are comparatively high, and at these times disturbance is likely to be less tolerated."
So pressing is the noise problem becoming, the Greater London Council has established one laboratory in its scientific laboratories solely devoted to sound and vibration, and European cities such as Zurich have assigned noise control functions to both their police and health departments.
These are but a few illustrations that the problem is worldwide and today's noises are of much greater significance than yesterday's. The noise victim is not alone in his suffering. And he has every reason for feeling disturbed. He is surrounded by an excess of noisemakers, motor-driven machines and devices that are not designed for quiet operation.
Though the largest cities, such as New York, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid vie with each other for the title of "noisiest," noise is no longer exclusively a large-city problem. Neither is it solely a problem of industrialized societies. From Addis Ababa to the western provinces of Zambia, the unmuffied operations and products of industry assail the ears. Natives of Nairobi join with New Yorkers and Muscovites in complaining about the noises of traffic and the din of horns. And Moto Nkama, young diplomat from Zambia assigned to the United Nations, does not find New York's noises strange. His mother's house was next to a copper smelter, and he grew up to the sounds of rocks falling off conveyor belts, "the bars of copper dropping with a crash."
Appearing as a guest on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show, I asked TV viewers to send me their particular noise. I knew the noise sources, but I wanted their geographical distribution. Sure enough, some 1,400 noise complaints poured in from every state of the Union, including Alaska and Hawaii. Farmers, small-town folks, owners of vacation homes and city residents alike asked where they could buy the acoustic earmuffs demonstrated on that show. It is a shock to note the growth of noise complaints in the smaller towns and villages. The escape hatch from the stresses of the large city has traditionally been to flee to the "country," and now that escape hatch is closing down.
The network of highways brings noise intrusion into the suburb. Medina, Washington, on the outskirts of Seattle, is trying to fend off freeway noise with a decibel limit enforced by its one policeman with a sound-level meter. The Sierra Club has reported that in the Humboldt Redwood State Park in California, "not a single grove in the park is beyond the sound of passing traffic." One harassed New Yorker was sadly disillusioned upon trying to escape to the pastoral quiet of New Hampshire: "I have moved from my apartment for three months to escape the jackhammers, garbage trucks and airplanes...only to find that the local sawmill has installed a new machine that is louder than all three New York instruments put together." Another New Yorker who bought a home in New Hampshire for summer use discovered that whereas in New York he was forced to wake up at 7:00 A.M. by legalized construction and other mechanized noises, in the wilds of New Hampshire he was awakened at 5:00 A.M. by chain-saw-wielding tree cutters who started out before dawn to avoid the heat of the day.
Noise pollution was at first endemic in the large cities, and in recent years their newspapers have been up in arms with anti-noise editorials. But a chilling omen of things to come is the appearance of such editorials in small-town newspapers like the Martha's Vineyard Gazette (inveighing against loud motorcycles and airport expansion) and this one from the Milford Cabinet, published in Milford, New Hampshire, population 3,916:
July 4, 1968 — Now "NOISE POLLUTION." ...Noise pollution is what we suffer from when we sit on the rocks looking out to sea enjoying the sense of the wind and the waves, but not enjoying at all the blast of soul music from the transistor radio on a nearby table.
Noise pollution is what shatters the neighborhood calm when one of those undersized motorcycles without a muffler goes up the road in the evening. Noise pollution is the convertible with the top down and the radio turned up high, which parks in front of the house before taking off with a screech of tires on asphalt...
Noise pollution emanates from the whole gamut of bulldozers, tractors, loaders, scrapers and trucks that we accept as the tools of our civilization. Noise pollution is the high-powered outboard motor, which scatters a flock of ducklings and destroys any illusions of peace that might have been sought by people along the shore of any of a thousand New England lakes...
Even running away to our presumably quieter neighbor to the north has its hazards. Canada's Maclean's Magazine warns city dwellers planning to buy a quiet farm to forget it. Farmers, the magazine reported, are becoming as deaf as fence posts because of "overexposure to noise."
The Dean of the University of Illinois School of Agriculture lists the problems to be caused by building industrial complexes on farm land as one of the challenges that must be faced by agricultural specialists.
So where does one go for quiet? Honolulu, where the pressure of complaints led to formation of a Mayor's Committee on Noise Control? The Virgin Islands, with a new jetport for St. Thomas and St. Croix? Snowmobile country in the north woods?
To students of industrialization and technological development, the extent of today's noise will come as no surprise. Nor will it be a surprise to the students of the population explosion. The rural population is flocking to the cities (to get away from those noisy tractors). Congestion alone is bringing noises closer to the receiver.
I now live in a giant housing complex of 4,000 apartments. My neighbors may be among the 40,000 working in the 15 acres of Rockefeller Center. Some share office space with 25,000 others in the Pan Am Building.
The insatiable pressure for housing is forcing human beings to live in intensely noisy housing sites. For example, a federation of trade unions, civic groups, and housing cooperatives is sponsoring Twin Pines Village, a New York State-financed cooperative to be built three miles from the end of two frequently used runways at Kennedy International Airport. Its sponsors are proceeding with this project in spite of the warnings of the Federal Aviation Administrator that "individual reactions resulting from noise exposure of this intensity would likely include vigorous complaints." The sponsors reply that they will insulate the roof, use double window panes, and install central air conditioning so the windows will not have to be opened in warm weather. And for the outdoors—fingers in the ears?
The pressure for housing, and the shortage and expense of city land, are forcing planners, unwisely, to build housing over "air rights." A complex of four 32-story buildings, with a mortgage financed by the state, was constructed on platforms over the Bronx approach to the George Washington Bridge. When it was opened in 1964, unsuspecting tenants moved in, only to find themselves subjected to the exhaust fumes and noise of the heavily traveled twelve-lane highway under the apartments. No one had ever thought of motor vehicles as sources of noise and pollution.