Blasts from the past

As Dublin’s foghorn is silenced, we remember some of the other sounds you may never hear again

FOGHORNS

Yesterday foghorns sounded in Ireland for the last time. The distinctive low bellow that moaned so plaintively whenever the fog came down will be heard no more. Modern technology has rendered foghorns obsolete as warning signals. There’s no replacing the frisson of hearing that familiar sound for those who lived in earshot, however.

SCRATCHED RECORDS

They were black, flat and round, with a hole in the middle, like gigantic, inedible Polo mints. And, sooner or later, records got scratched. The needle would jump and skitter, the music would drag or yowl, and curses would ensue as this sound repeated over and over. It wasn’t quite as bad as the dreadful sound of chalk squeaking on a blackboard, but it wasn’t far off.

HERALD OR PRESS?

Actually, what the newspaper sellers cried out was one long word that ran together: “Heeeeeraaaaaaaalrrrrrrr Preeeeeeeessss.” Heard only in Dublin, to the best of my knowledge, and cried only by the male species, also to the best of my knowledge. Sadly, with the closure of the Press group in 1995 that mantra disappeared from the streets of Dublin forever.

DIAL TONE

Remember the public telephones that had Press Button A and Press Button B to get through? Those buttons advised you to slot your money into them and then usually swallowed it without actually connecting you. You did not press buttons to get through to a number, however. You put a finger in the space for each number and pulled it over clockwise until it clicked back into place again. We still call it dialling a number, even though now we press buttons.

CROSSED LINES

In less sophisticated days, landlines were always getting crossed. You would pick up the phone to dial a number, and someone would already be inside your phone, talking. Except they weren’t talking to you. They were having a conversation with someone else, with no idea that you were listening in by default, and you weren’t sure whether to keep listening or to hang up and try again. Perhaps they got the idea for conference calls out of crossed lines.

SOUND OF A MODEM

The dial-up signal of computers going online sounded like a miniature steam train coming down the tracks in your own home. Or something from a science experiment that was about to go very wrong. It certainly made a loud announcement to all nearby that you were entering Online Land.

CORNCRAKE

The crek-crek-crek sound of the shy brown bird that hides out in meadows and fields is not silenced totally in Ireland, but it is much reduced. Many people, especially in rural areas, remember hearing the corncrake calling at night. Mechanised farming and cutting meadows in their entirety have meant a huge drop in the numbers of corncrake, now a protected species.

JACKHAMMERS

Make that drills, concrete mixers and all sounds usually connected with construction. In the past decade you were never far from the sound of something being built in Ireland. Today, you are.

FAST FORWARD

Wheeeeeeeeee. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. If you disliked a song on your tape cassette, then there was nothing to be done except fast-forward through it. This was an inexact science, and often involved winding the tape backwards and forwards to try to reach the exact place you wanted to start at again. Journalists transcribing interviews could be driven slightly demented by searching for a particular quote, a telling sigh or silence. The digital recorder, the iPod and its ilk have seen off the wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

TYPEWRITERS

How many films started with the furious tapping of keys on a manual typewriter, and the little ping! as the carriage return was reached? We still have keyboards, and the Qwerty layout is still with us, but the distinctive brisk click of ink-covered metal letter imprinting on paper is gone from all modern offices.