Sounds Of The Past

Jenny, of the 1870 to 1917 blog, before her tragic passing, observed on M. L. Wright's blog:

The difference between sound of a jet and the sound of any kind of prop plane, let alone the differences between various kinds of prop planes, is striking. It dawned on me at some point that the world we live in now has completely different sound effects than the worlds of the past. To take a trivial example, the cash registers of the past had a very distinctive “ka-ching!” when the transaction had been punched in and the cash drawer shot out. A lot of this difference in sounds has to do with the change from mechanical to electronic. Mechanisms gave us the distinctive rhythms and pulses of objects made of metal moving in some fashion. Even where the item in question remains essentially mechanical—say the diesel locomotive that replaced the steam locomotive—the sounds are different. The sounds of steam—that is a whole other story.

Right she was.