I am thinking about my birthday in 1958. I was born on the same day as Michael Jackson.
In any case, I doodling some words about what life was like then.
It occurs to me that nothing beeped. Phones and doorbells rang, cars did not make any special sound.
I wonder when the first gadget beeped. Any thoughts?
The Beeper? (too obvious?)
Don’t know about gadgets, but the Greenwich time signal has been broadcast in the UK in the form of beeps (or “pips”) since 1924. This format for a broadcast time signal was subsequently copied in many other countries. In time it gave rise to a cinematic trope, which was certainly around by the 1950s, in which futuristic high-tech machinery would emit beeps, so that the audience would know that it was futuristic and hight-tech.
I don’t know when the first was, but before the 1950s, if you wanted something to give you some sort of alert, something electro-mechanical or purely mechanical was usually your best solution.
Transistors started making their way into common electronics in the 1950s. Once you have cheap transistors, then a simple transistor-based oscillator circuit can be used to make an electronic beep. I’m guessing that beeps started making their way into things in the later 1950s or early 1960s. Since transistors were still fairly new and expensive even at the end of the 1950s, transistor-based things would have similarly been fairly expensive.
I’m guessing that things that regular people could afford and would commonly buy started beeping some time in the 1960s. By this point, transistors were becoming cheaper. Transistor-based electronics were also new and exciting to folks. Having a transistor radio was a way of one-upping your neighbor with his old tube radio.
The sound may have existed earlier, but the earliest citation in the OED for the word beep is from 1929. The quotation explicitly refers to a certain type of automobile horn.
Not a gadget, but The Road Runner was already saying “beep-beep”–or was it “meep-meep”?–in his first starring role in Fast and Furry-ous (1949).
Sure they did. They went Beep Beep,* especially if it was a Nash Rambler trying to pass a Caddy.
*The Playmates, 1958
Stuff beeped in Colonel Bleep(1957), the first color TV cartoon, although Bleep himself bleeped.
The Apple II series of computers circa 1980 was big on beeping. Pressing Control+G produced what was called a “bell” but it was a beep.
From the Apple IIe manual which is searchable:
https://apple2online.com/web_documents/apple_iie_programmer__s_manual.pdf
Except that bit you quoted stated that the first ones didn’t actually beep, they buzzed.
The Netflix series White Rabbit Project, hosted by Kari, Grant, and Tory from Mythbusters, actually explored the history of things that beep in episode 7, “Tech We Love to Hate.” I’m pretty sure the answer is in there. I don’t remember what it is and I don’t have time to rewatch it right now as I need to get to bed soon, but I’m pretty sure the answer is in that episode.
Thank you all. Perhaps a ham radio operator might have heard a beep for time signals.
So I watched that White Rabbit ep and they blamed it on the piezolelectric speaker. Knowing very little about this tech I did some research.
The History of Piezoelectricity says:
You didn’t’t need to be a ham radio operator. Time signals in the form of beeps have been a routine feature of many countries ordinary public broadcasting for decades. As already noted, the BBC has been broadcasting them routinely, many times a day, since 1924.
That’s because it’s an ASCII control character, originally developed for teletype machines, where sending that character would ring a physical bell.
Radiotelegraphy: Morse code over radio.
At least as far back as the 60s you used to be able to call a phone number to get the exact time from The Phone Company. Every 10 seconds it would say, “At the sound of the tone, the time will be six oh-four AM and twenty seconds…[beep]”. That’s maybe not a “thing going beep” though.
The USSR’s Sputnik satellite broadcast a beeping sound as it orbited the Earth in 1957.
My first WAG thought was some sort of medical device. When you’re in a hospital you are surrounded with beeps.
In reading the other answers, though, I doubt that is correct.
mmm
The car horns of little European cars?
Came in to post this, too. According to that link, the technology to make Morse Code radio transmissions sound like beeps was invented in 1901 and became common after 1913.
So, what’s the difference between a beep and a buzz?
A (SPST-NC) relay and a speaker is all that’s needed to make a noise. A relay by itself can also make some not-too-beepy noise. Technology available by the 1830s-1850s.
The electronic kits I played with as a kid could be used to do this. But I think the purists would describe the sound more as a buzz.
How do you convert a buzz into a beep? A [del]condenser[/del] capacitor plus maybe a resistor could smooth out the sound and make it more like a tone, ergo a “beep”. While capacitors go back to Volta and such, “modern” ones suitable for the application were developed in the 1870s.
So that gives ~latish 1800s as to when a “beep” could have been made. Given all the people working on various telephonic devices in the era, certainly someone made something that beeped. When such a component was first incorporated into a product may not be knowable. But it probably predates tubes, let alone transistors.