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Today and Tomorrow

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 unmuffled 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.

Noise is nothing new. Even the main reasons for most noise–convenience and speed–are as old as the first squeaky wheel. Chariots racing noisily over Rome’s cobblestones forced Julius Caesar to try–unsuccessfully–to ban daytime charioteering. The unwanted sounds of the past were less intense, less frequent, traveled shorter distances, and reached fewer ears.

Some would like us to think we have merely traded new noises for old. But the acoustic attack on man and his environment really began in earnest with the Industrial Revolution. From a predominantly agricultural husbandry, man found himself uprooted by the pull of the factories to the grime and congestion of the cities. He found himself surrounded on all sides by factories making millions of devices to enable him to speed over the surface of the earth, soar through the skies, and blend orange juice.

Men by the millions work in these factories. They operate noisy machines to noisily blast, buff, chip, stamp, punch, forge, grind, and polish metal; saw, plane, sandblast and polish wood; press ink on paper; weave wire and textiles, and work all kinds of plastics. Fabricated parts–bearings, pistons, gears, levers, fan blades–are assembled into devices that turn, rotate, blow, slide and push, and explode. The noisy components are welded, mechanically screwed, bolted and glued into visually attractive outer shells and pushed openly on the markets of the world.

Behind their high-style façades, air conditioners, for example, generate the complex sounds of: magnetic hum, reciprocating compressor put-put, fan-generated pure tones, and cycling noise, described as a combination of clatter from piston slap and magnetic hum. Fans in ventilating systems and air conditioners, or just plain electric fans, generate noise because of imbalance, bearings, brushes, gears and magnetic hum. Communities in which many homes use heat pumps and window units are described as sounding like beehives. A curious acoustical engineer took noise level readings one evening in a narrow New York street, surrounded by high-rise luxury buildings, each with its own air conditioner unit. There were no lullabies in the 90-plus decibel levels. The new type of unit used for detached homes leaves the condensing unit outdoors for the neighbors to hear. These units are so noisy, manufacturers advertise that new designs direct most of the noise upward instead of at the neighbors.

Mechanical marvels transport man and his goods by land, by sea, and by air with explosive-type engines that propel his vehicles; certain types of planes now traverse the air so rapidly, sound cannot keep up. Powerful mechanized versions of the pickaxe and the sledgehammer build the places he is going to, and the roads to get there-air compressors, jackhammers, piledrivers, steam shovels, bulldozers, compactors, rock drills.

Many of the more delicate mechanisms are called appliances and they provide man with convenience and comfort once his shelter is built. They are available in infinite variety to use in the kitchen to refrigerate his perishables, freeze his ice cream, make ice cubes, crush ice, grind his meat, juice his fruit, electrically cut, slice and shred, mix and blend his food, open cans, purify water, broil, masticate the garbage, exhaust the smells of it all, and wash the dishes.

Other appliances speed him through his bathroom operations with dispatch and a minimum of effort. All he has to do is stand at a stooped attention and give the toothbrush salute, and electric motors will squirt water into every dental nook and cranny, polish every ivory. With no more effort than moving his arm up and down, his stubble is removed from under a lather which just slithered into his hand from the mechanical lather-making machine. If he has time to sit in a tub, a hydrotherapy machine will spare him the need to paddle the water around.

No sultan in his harem had the mechanical servants modern man has in his living room. Consider the devices to cool air, purify air, warm air, push air, while mechanical fingers massage his aching frame as he reclines in his motorized vibrating lounge chair.

When he has used his electric shoe polisher and is ready to retire for the night, he has a massage machine and an electrically operated bed. His wife has a mechanical hair dryer (4.3 million were sold in 1967), an electric manicure outfit, and even an electric razor.

And for all rooms, TV sets, radios, stereos, tape machines, and for creative self-expression, amplified instruments. Not to mention mechanical hobby tools–including chain saws–and lawn mowers. It is almost impossible to find a home that does not have at least one radio and one television set. In the last twenty years the electronics industry has sold more than 450 million radios, 130 million television sets, 83 million phonographs, 33 million tape recorders and playback units. The industry estimates that more than 515 million consumer electronic instruments are in use today, and these products are selling at a rate of 75 million annually.

One of the latest noise sources is the siren-like burglar alarm. Installed in automobiles and in homes, their owners are usually not around when they go off. Innocent neighbors, in increasing numbers, are being forced to endure hours of agonizing mechanical screams.

Without regulation, toys have joined the decibel madness, and are designed with noise as a sales feature. Velocipedes are equipped with simulated motor noises, plus horns. Toy carbide cannons make a mighty roar that can be heard for blocks. The acoustician reviewing a patent for a device designed to sound like a one-cylinder motorcycle engine was provoked to comment: “The joy of making noise is the birthright of every youngster. but must he have a battery-powered machine to make it for him!”

Animal noise, too, is proliferating. Possibly to assuage the increasing coldness and alienation of urban living, apartment dwellers are taking to pets. It is estimated that whereas five to ten per cent kept pets five years ago, the odds are that one out of six now has a dog or cat.

One of the major reasons for today’s noisy world is the mobile noise source of vehicles. Trucks and buses are especially obnoxious. London studies have shown that if the traffic mix reaches 50 per cent heavy vehicles, there is a doubling of loudness over traffic with only 20 per cent heavy vehicles. According to that survey, when traffic moves on even a slight gradient, there is an increase in noise, and under these circumstances, trucks are the worst offenders. A truck can almost double its noise level on 1-in-20 gradient at 30 mph.

Unpleasant noise exposure is a combination of power and the number of times that a powerful source makes itself heard. The aviation industry is providing us with both exposure to incredibly powerful–and noisy–motors, and millions of exposures.

The Federal Aviation Administration handled 41 million landings and takeoffs in 1966, recording 1,925 landings and takeoffs in one day that year at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. An average of one a minute. New York Congressman Joseph P. Addabbo has reported as many as one movement every 30 seconds at Kennedy International Airport. When a typical long-range, four-engine jet transport lands, approximately eight square miles of land outside the airport are exposed to generally unacceptable noise levels. This is a conservative estimate of the area rendered intolerable.

No wonder the Federal Council for Science and Technology could report that “the over-all loudness of environmental noise is doubling every ten years.”

Let us imagine that John Doe and his family want to escape some of these noise sources, not by running away to some South Sea island, but by being able to close the door of their home. This form of escape, too, is disappearing. Whether he pays $100 a month in a low-income housing project, or can afford $1,000 for a postwar luxury apartment, it is fairly certain he will hear the steps, jumps, radio, TV, dropped toys, and furniture-moving of the people in the apartment above. Paradoxically, as his world grew noisier, John Doe’s dwelling space was built to allow that noise to enter. Gone are the dwellings of fifty years ago with their heavy walls and rooms separated from each other by tightfitting doors. Returning after World War II, Private John Doe was rewarded by the building industry with some of the noisiest buildings in existence.

Even those new glass office buildings with their glittering façades can be a nightmare to work in. Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, President of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, describes his reaction to this type of postwar construction: “I recently saw a building on Park Avenue, one of those glass boxes. They were tearing up the street outside, of course. The architect asked me if it weren’t beautiful from the outside. I couldn’t hear him, fortunately. Inside, in order to preserve the open space and the beautiful visual environment, he had kept the walls down low. The office racket added to the racket of the street, beautifully transmitted through the glass. So it was the environment of a boiler factory. I told him later, when we managed to get where we could talk, that only the stone deaf could have enjoyed the visual experience.”

This unprecedented noise exposure, plus the increasing scarcity of areas of escape, is distressing millions of human beings. And not only the popular stereotype of “the little old lady in tennis shoes” (meaning by that someone who has nothing better to do than complain about something), but heads of state, government officials, and responsible citizens, are upset. A distinguished architectural acoustician and former Chancellor of the University of California, Dr. Vern Knudsen, finds noise “the scourge of the twentieth century.” Dr. Rosen of CQC describes noise as a “molester.” Other noise victims describe noise as something that drives them wild, gives them a headache, makes them nauseous and dizzy, keeps them from sleeping. Even the cow is affected by noise, and to a farmer, noise means less milk yield. Society now speaks of “noise pollution,” “ear pollution,” “audio pollution,” and “audible harassment.” It is so noisy that the Handbook of Noise Measurement lists 106 words “commonly used to describe sounds of various types.” These range from bang and bark through ping, pop, pow, to rattle, scrunch, squeak, and thud, thump, and yap.

Noise is even penetrating the subconscious. A disc jockey started to read a weather report just handed to him: “…very loudy today.” He stopped, and broke up laughing. He then predicted that in the future there will be noise reports–mildly loudy, impossibly loudy, and so on.

Noise is such an omnipresent part of our lives that to many it is the “natural” accompaniment of civilization, the “price of progress,” with the jackhammer as its symbol. To mark the opening of that Sixth Avenue subway extension, businessmen placed full-page newspaper ads featuring a happy jackhammer operator. It was a shock to me to see him again in a public service ad promoting religion in American life. Presumably the advertising agency saw him as a happy symbol of progress.

Some city people believe that it would detract from the function of the subway if the trains were pleasingly quiet and stations were designed for tranquility. A young but able and imaginative New York architect told me he would not want to design a subway train so quiet that its riders and those waiting in the station would be unaware there was a train in their midst. Neither did he want the subway stations to look “like the lobby of the Plaza Hotel.” He cautioned me against trying to make the city too quiet. He wanted New York to maintain a certain level of sound energy as a desirable aspect of city life. Perhaps he was also being considerate of the needs of the wife of a Midwest manufacturer of musical instruments who enjoys noise and “imports” tapes of New York street noises to sleep by!

Partly because of the duality within each of us as both makers and receivers of noise, we wish to be free to make noise ourselves, even if we may not enjoy the noise made by others. “The North American motoring public,” reports George Thiessen, a Canadian government researcher, “has a split personality about the growing problems of traffic noise. As homeowners they would like to enjoy an evening out of doors in peace and quiet, but as motorists they want the maximum power to give maximum acceleration even if the tires squeal. They like to hear their vroom, or at least some of them do.”

It is a commonplace that noisemaking is associated with virility, and that objections to noise are associated with a lack of masculinity. To protect oneself from noise, let alone complain, is also deemed unmanly. In a lecture on noise, one acoustical expert related a personal experience during his early years working in a factory. He literally had watched a colleague go deaf. “It took five to six years. He was working in a test block at Republic Aviation. He was too much of a man, he thought, to wear earmuffs.”

Motorcycle (and sports car) manufacturers design to satisfy the demand for conspicuous noisemaking. The theories behind this demand are many, ranging from the use of noise as a protective device to ward off the drivers of bigger cars and trucks to the concept of noise as a mating call. Why would any sexually frustrated motorcyclist support noise-control legislation if he equates noisy motorcycling with lovemaking? The sex-via-noise theory was reported to the American Psychiatric Association by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Armand N. Nicholi, Jr. According to one press report, Dr. Nicholi believes that some sexually troubled college-age men relieve their feelings of sexual inadequacy with “an unusual preoccupation with the motorcycle.” Though he described his patients as expressing fears of death and castration when they discussed motorcycle riding, he also reported on the “appeal of… the intrusion of the deafening noise into other people’s ears…” as suggesting a genital or phallic feature. This line of thinking suggests that the big-city cab driver is not blowing his horn to satisfy his passenger’s desire for speed. It also suggests that “showboating,” as columnist Russell Baker describes the unnecessary use of fire engine sirens, may not mean that the firemen are saying to the taxpayers, “See how productive I am.” With very little stretching, Dr. Nicholi’s sexual aberration theory might give the public grounds for attacking noisy motorcyclists and motorists as perpetrators of aural sodomy.

New York’s 1930 Noise Commission psyched the horn-honking driver. “Even in free flowing traffic, some motorists appear to take an almost fiendish delight in sounding their horns when there is nothing in the way.” Today’s American motorists object to the quieter city horn on European imports, and some European car manufacturers are discontinuing the export of the dual city-country horn to the United States.

I once naively told a horn-blowing New York cab driver, “You’re violating the law.”

“What law?” he smirked. “My elbow slipped.”

In contrast, a Cockney cab driver taught me a lesson in driver attitude. We were caught in rush-hour traffic on the way to Heathrow Airport. Several times other vehicles cut in front of us.

Each time, conditioned by those New York cabbies, I braced for the retaliatory horn. Silence. Finally, after a third such incident, my horn-conditioned nervous system couldn’t take the suspense, and I asked the driver, “Why didn’t you blow your horn? Is it against the law?”

“No, it’s not against the law. Only at night. I didn’t toot because it’s not good manners. Besides, might rattle the chap.”

Is the horn honker a sadist? The horn-blowing truck driver or motorcyclist who has gutted his muffler may not be as interested in expressing his virility as he is in acting out a need for inflicting pain. If the operator and the manufacturer of noisy machines are unconsciously working out sadistic tendencies that exist in many of us, the rationale behind objections to noise-control legislation becomes clear.

This innate desire to make noise and to inflict noise on others may be one explanation of the electronic noise explosion. That the rapid growth of television and stereo is likely more than a hunger for culture is indicated in a paper by Dr. H. Angus Bowes presented before the Psychiatric Research Association in 1957. As reported in Time Magazine, his “Psychopathology of the Hi-Fi Addict” contained this revealing passage: “Naturally, the less organized will treat their hi-fi set rather like the emotionally immature treat a car–as an expression of aggression, as a power symbol. To many [hi-fi] has a sexual connotation. Perhaps in the twiddling of knobs, there may be a masturbatory equivalent. Certainly the ability to take control of a situation relieves anxiety and what control is given to the manipulator of a hi-fi apparatus when, with a flick of the wrist, he may attenuate his treble, emphasize his bass, turn down the volume to a whisper, or blast the neighbors with a Niagara of sound.”

Manufacturers of audio equipment are not unaware of the needs they are satisfying. A Fisher Radio advertisement offered “Power! Power! The power to unleash wattage and make an almighty noise is a favorite fantasy of the hi-fi extremist…Take, for example, the devastatingly powerful Fisher system…The 700-T and the two XP-18s can blast the roof off your house if you have an itchy volume-control finger.”

This kind of intense noisemaking is not all give. The maker wants to hear, as well. Some of us want to be “turned on” with sound. This phenomenon parallels the increasing use of LSD, marijuana, and other means of getting high. A member of one of the popular electronically-amplified combos, the Grateful Dead, told a reporter from The New York Times: “Part of our thing is to try to turn people on with our music, because if you’re up tight you can’t relax.” This new music-to-relax-by can sound like a “derailed freight train plunging over a cliff.” Audiences enjoy this new listening experience. When the Butterfield Blues Band blasted away in New York’s Town Hall behind ten massed amplifiers, the bulk of the audience did not find it too loud. Audiences are also responding favorably to the use of multimedia, an attack on all senses with intense light, sound, colors, smells, visual images, combinations of high decibel rock’n’roll, wailing sirens, simulated thunderclaps–all used to blitz the audience.

Scientists who work in the field of noise are fatalists. They equate noise with progress, and the future with noise. They believe advancing civilizations will create more noise, not less.

The key to tomorrow’s noise is quantum, a dramatic jump in noise sources, noise intensities, and human sensitivity. At the same time, there will be a decrease in our ability to escape.

Demographers predict that by the year 2000, 50 per cent of the population of the United States will live in three supercities: “Boswash,” a megalopolis stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C.; “Chipitt,” stretching from Chicago to Pittsburgh; and “Sansan,” encompassing the area from San Diego to San Francisco.

There may be as many urban buildings constructed in the next 40 to 50 years as in all mankind’s history.

Cities and suburbs alike will reverberate to the roar of the jackhammer and the air compressor as they strain to accommodate the 80 per cent of the population expected to live in urban areas by 1985. Some idea of what it will be like is already heard in New York City, with its annual average of 10,000 demolitions plus 80,000 street repair projects. To add acoustic insult to the “normal” construction noise injury, the construction industry is planning to use helicopters to place heavy slabs of concrete and other building parts into position. The Westchester County, New York, local of the International Union of Operating Engineers (its members operate air compressors) is training some of its members to operate helicopters for that purpose.

Bedlam, anyone?

But this will only be the frosting on the acoustic cake. By the year 2000, 73 per cent of the estimated 180 million cars in the United States may be distributed among the 235 million people projected as dwellers in metropolitan centers. Each vehicle has the potential of brake screech, horn blowing, engine noise, and tire noise.

Probably aware of the potential road block, civilization is moving ahead with the development of high-speed train service. This is fine if somebody designs a quieter engine. If not, a new dimension in sound will be added to the lives of those living adjacent to the railroad tracks. They will hear the “screaming electric motors” as the trains roar by “in a terrifying swoosh of noise.” Or at least that’s what is expected by the reporter for The New York Times who covered the first public test of a new high-speed train for service between New York and Washington.

As bad as the future looks in terms of noise from surface traffic, the greatest threat to acoustic sanity is posed by the vehicles that will be shuttling back and forth on aerial corridors in the sky. It almost seems as if all dials are “go” for the human race to noisily take to the air.

One hybrid form of transportation is the hovercraft. This vehicle “floats” on a cushion of air a few feet off the surface, which may be either land or water. It has not yet been clearly defined as aerial, marine, or surface transportation. But whatever else it is, there’s no doubt that it is noisy.

Private pleasure hovercraft are entering the market, and what noisy skimobiles are to the winter sportsman, noisy hovercraft are becoming for the summer recreation-seeker. There are models powered by 100-hp outboard motors, models powered by 30-hp air-cooled foreign car motors. One model can travel over lake, river, snow, and marsh areas. In England a do-it-yourself kit has been developed and in 1966 Britons were warned by one newspaper reporter to brace themselves for the new din of homemade hovercraft, “a new menace to British eardrums, including those of horses, cows, and sheep in once peaceful, rural retreats.”

And out in America’s winter wonderlands it’s no longer the sound of sleigh bells ringing but snowmobiles roaring.

As if to guarantee that no habitat will be free of the noise of jet engines, the Department of Defense (DOD) is now developing a jet belt that enables its wearer to fly over buildings and streets. Powered by a small fan-jet engine, it promises a new contender for any list of ten most unwanted sounds.

But these developments are nothing compared to what’s in store in “normal” aviation. So rapid is aviation development that only statistics do it justice. Projections for the decade ending 1977 are for an increase in passenger miles flown from 76 billion in 1966 to 266 billion in 1977. To serve these passengers the aviation industry will provide more and larger planes and more airports. The FAA forecast is for 180,000 general aviation planes to be produced by 1977, plus 3,500 transports. This increased volume of aircraft is creating a demand for more jetports. The thousands of planes aloft during the day now require 10,000 landing facilities. As of September 1, 1969, 259 were needed for jets. The FAA projects another 132 jetports by 1974. The pressure for jetport expansion is being met by strong resistance by a public unwilling to put up with such a noisy neighbor.

Jet takeoffs and landings are responsible for much of what it is like to live with aviation noise. The FAA projection to 1977 is that its air control towers will be handling an increase of landings and takeoffs from 41.2 million to 139 million.

What is in store for the nation’s larger cities is indicated by the prediction that Los Angeles International Airport will handle 80 million passengers a year. Skeptics doubt that the Boeing 747 and the projected 900-passenger C-5 Galaxy will significantly reduce the number of plane movements.

Tomorrow means an increase in the number of people subjected to jet noise, and an increase in the number of exposures. Part of that increase in noise exposure is caused by the increasing distance from the airport in which jet noise makes itself felt. Where once complaints stopped at a radius of four miles from the airport, the growing blanket of jet noise now radiates a distance of fifteen miles from airports, and further.

Formerly pastoral resort and spa areas are being encroached upon. Witness the recommendation of the Hudson River Valley Commission, which believes that to increase the over-all values of the Valley there is need for landing fields to accommodate the rise in recreational travel by air. It suggested a study to prepare a plan for a system of small landing strips to provide access to recreation areas, “with proper controls to assure that users of such areas are not disturbed by aircraft noise.” Given today’s airplane engines, what kind of controls does this Commission have in mind?

If there is one immutable law that governs aviation development, it is escalation. More and larger aircraft, and more and more airports, not only in and around large cities but in the small towns of America.

On March 5, 1969, the Lakeland High School in Shrub Oak, New York, was jammed, but not with students. From 7:30 P.M. until midnight, the State Joint Legislative Committee on Mass Transportation held a public hearing to assess public opinion on the proposed Somers Airport. Except for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency promoting more airports, all the spokesmen–town supervisors, high school principals, conservationists, and representatives of citizens’ anti-airport groups–were opposed.

The Somers facility, proposed for the heart of a suburban-exurban-rural region, would generate enough noise to preclude Federal Housing Authority mortgages, to interfere with the classroom activities of more than a dozen schools, to require close to half-a-million dollars for soundproofing schools, and to force the rezoning of valuable residential property for commercial and industrial use. Somers was rejected as a site, but the FAA, in cooperation with state, regional, and local authorities, has recommended a nationwide development of new general aviation airports and the expansion of smaller airports.

There is now a more immediate threat to the cities, and its initials are V/STOL, vertical and short takeoff and landing planes. (These include helicopters.)

To relieve congestion at the major airports, the FAA and the aviation industry, in cooperation with local and state governments, are promoting V/STOLs for interurban service. The STOL can take off in a short run of a few hundred feet. The VTOL takes off and lands straight up and down, and then cruises like a fixed-wing aircraft. Because of the relatively small space requirements, these craft are deemed feasible for mid-city areas. There are today some 55 VTOL projects around the world, and in the back of the minds of their developers is the anticipated market for interurban transportation.

Morris Ketchum, a past president of the American Institute of Architects, told New York’s First Conference on Urban Noise Control, in March 1967, that he predicted city planners will set aside land for use of STOLcraft on cleared lots, abandoned piers, atop railroad stations, over railroad tracks. A few months after Mr. Ketchum’s predictions, the senior vice president of Eastern Airlines reported that air traffic delays were costly, and he recommended STOL planes for short hauls between cities in the Northeast Corridor, stretching from Boston to Washington. In October 1967, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) was already investigating the need for V/STOL service in Boston, Hartford, Providence, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Trenton, Baltimore, and Washington.

The FAA 1968 National Airport Plan recommends 25 STOLports for the New York-Washington, D.C. corridor and the West Coast. Nine are scheduled for New York City.

Nassau County and New Jersey communities are evolving plans for STOLcraft operations to Manhattan, with, as one idea, landing pads to be built in the rivers around the island.

What will happen to the urban environment when New York, for example, at only one STOLport site, accommodates an expected 14 million passengers a year plus two million tons of cargo? And how will downtown Los Angeles fare, and Anaheim, and the area around the STOLport in your city or suburb or small town?

The acoustical consulting firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman has stated in its house organ Activities, “The development of vertical takeoff-and-landing planes might eliminate some of the nuisance around large airports but it would spread the problem [of noise nuisance] to many other locations.”

Proponents try to lessen opposition by claiming the approaches and takeoffs will be either over water or in non-residential areas. But these planes are designed to fly at low altitudes and it is difficult to visualize a flight path that avoids residential areas, schools, hospitals, and parks. As a matter of aviation safety, the height of office buildings makes flight paths over residential areas safer and thus more desirable.

V/STOLs are not butterflies.

Gird for protest.

Tomorrow’s noise will be more disturbing and crueler than today’s, for two reasons. First, we are increasing the number of noise sources and saturating the entire environment. Second, we are becoming sensitized to noise.

From England comes this observation from a Senior Lecturer in Acoustics at the University of Liverpool:

“Our reactions at a particular instant depend among other factors on our noise history; we are also becoming more noise conscious… We have a tendency to create more noise and a growing awareness of noise.”

We may be becoming less tolerant because, as some authorities believe, noise assault is cumulative and the threshold of sensitivity is lowered with increased exposure.

We have not yet begun to cope with the noisy bus and truck and jet, and already we are extending the welcome mat to new intrusive noise sources. When rivers become aviation runways and the space over center-city is nothing but elevator shafts for helicopters and escalator space for STOLs, city-man is going to feel he is living in the center of the Iron Maiden. Not to mention the sonic boom carpet to be thrown over people not living near the large metropolitan center (to be discussed in detail in Chapter 5).