Sound marks the turning point of an era.
Living in the time of 2019, you are all too familiar with the sound of the “beep”: the microwave spins for lunch, the smoke detector when you see food spinning in the oven smokes, the sound of Alexa / Siri / Google Assistant starts advising you to call fire and millions of other tech stuff.
Like horns, beeps only have one thing: to draw your attention to beep technology. But its history is much longer, much longer than you might think, before the age of technology.
The starting point for the beep came from the space age, when the first man-made satellite Sputnik transmitted sound signals to the ground, signaling to the control station that it was doing its job well.
On a special newscast broadcast by CBS News, the first 18 seconds was a prerecorded beep, immediately followed by the voice of host Douglas Edwards: “Until two days ago the sound you just heard was n has never appeared on this Earth. Then all of a sudden it’s part of the 20th century and so is the noise coming from your vacuum cleaner ”.
Storm Sputnik swept through all parts of the Earth, major newspapers simultaneously reported hot news on the technology that marked a new era of emergence, the era of space discovery, the space age – the space age. The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune published the specific flight schedule for the first artificial satellite, the New York Times gave an article explaining why regular radios could not pick up Sputnik’s beep.
But Sputnik himself didn’t contribute much to science, he had a simple meaning: to show the technological prowess of the Russians. The Americans had another thought: 4 months after Sputnik took off, the United States successfully launched Explorer 1, a satellite equipped with the most advanced scientific tools.
Immediately, Explorer 1 set a major milestone, the first major discovery of the space age: the existence of the Van Allen ring of radiation that surrounds Earth.
But science is inherently boring, few people care about a high Earth ring, but people are interested in what exists right in front of their eyes and ears: the “beep” of the Sputnik satellite. To any lucky person who hears a sound that has never appeared before, they feel lucky to hear for the first time a very… high-tech noise.
The word “beep” is in the dictionary as the word describing the sound of the car horn, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary since 1929. Before the “beep” became the call of the future, the former using the word “Beep” “to describe the operation of electronic devices is the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, when he wrote his novel The Sands of Mars – Cat Mars in 1951.
If you don’t know, Arthur C. Clarke is probably best known for writing 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on a science-fiction film of the same name with a screenplay starring Mr. Clarke and talented director Stanley Kubrick Pens, who concern an artificial intelligence that has evolved to gain notoriety. He is dubbed the “Prophet of the Space Age”, along with a series of sci-fi heralds on the future of technology.
Speaking of Sputnik, it “beeps” for 21 consecutive days, it runs out of battery, but it is more than enough time for the beep itself to become a symbol for electronic equipment. But like all other sounds, hearing a lot is definitely annoying, giving rise to an “illness” called “alarm fatigue”; Research shows that the beeping can make doctors, nurses or healthcare professionals less productive.
But the disturbing story above still shows the influence of the beep on modern society. As the day after Sputnik’s release, NBC News reported:
