In Pursuit of Silence (25 page)

Considering the fate of Babbage, Carlyle might have been merely being prudent when he damped down his public activism against noise and focused on pursuing silence in his own home. In danger, he claimed, of being driven mad by itinerant musicians (along with the songs of a neighbor’s “Demon Fowls”—Cochin China roosters), he decided to soundproof his study on the top floor of his home. At first, he was all excitement, writing a friend,
“We are again
building
in Cheyne Row: a perfectly soundproof
apartment this time; deaf utterly, did you even fire cannon beside it, and perfect in ventilation; such is the program—calculated to be the envy of surrounding ‘enraged musicians,’ and an invaluable conquest to me henceforth, if it prosper!”

“If it prosper,” indeed. Quickly, the noise of the soundproof operation itself became a wretched commotion:
“Irish laborers fetching
and carrying, tearing and rending, our house once more a mere dust-cloud and chaos come again.” Carlyle fled the operation—and the house—leaving both to the directorship of his wife, who was relieved to be free of her husband’s oppressive noise consciousness.
“Now that I feel
the noise and dirt and disorder with my own senses, and not through his as well, it is amazing how little I care about it,” she wrote.

Before the dust had even settled, it became clear that, despite the use of sound-mitigation strategies that would be perfectly respectable today (such as double walls and a specially designed slate roof with sound-deadening air chambers beneath), the project was a fiasco. Carlyle characterized the efforts as “totally futile.” Ultimately, he declared the room to be by far the noisiest place in the entire house. Even its vaunted perfect ventilation was a bust. Shortly after its completion, Carlyle climbed to the study and
shut himself up
inside to smoke a pipe in mournful contemplation of his ruined dreams. Fortunately, his absence was noticed before much time had passed. A housemaid found Carlyle splayed unconscious on his study floor, overcome by smoke fumes.

Worst of all, the whole experience had darkened his view of human nature. His fantasy of a soundproof room, Carlyle now realized,
“was a flattering delusion
of an ingenious needy builder.”
In combination with shoddy building and crippling expenses, the moral depravity evidenced in the work of his soundproofers made the room “a kind of infernal ‘miracle’” to him, his “first view of the Satan’s invisible world that prevails in that department as in others.” It was a fate fit for a Greek myth. Carlyle’s dream of a soundless room left him with both the noisiest room in his domain and an embittering recognition that corruption thrives even at the heart of man’s noblest calling: the pursuit of silence.

And still, despite Carlyle’s failure, the rise of so-called brainwork went hand in hand with the refinement of soundproofing technology. Even earplugs got better. The old problems of irritation from beeswax and the skanky decomposition of sheep tallow were overcome by composite plugs mixed with cotton wool.
Franz Kafka grew reliant
on a new line of such plugs to muffle daytime noises and had them specially sent from Berlin—though he lamented to his fiancée that they were still rather messy and wished that the tiny steel “sleeping balls” a Strindberg hero slipped into his ears could be found outside the author’s imagination. By the early twentieth century, Carlyle’s fantasy of a room that would be impervious to sound even if a cannon were fired beside it was closer to becoming a reality.

Floyd Watson, author of
a pioneering 1922 work on soundproofing techniques, reported that during the First World War a room was built to insulate the sounds of machine guns being tested. It was a room inside a room, actually: four inches of ground cork lined its wooden walls; a double layer of flax boards padded the ceiling. Bullets were shot into a big heap of absorptive sand.
The insulation worked well enough that neighbors across the street had no idea what was happening inside the building until one of the gunners forgot to shut the double-pane windows after opening them to fan out the billowing clouds of powder smoke.

Exciting developments in soundproofing were happening around the world. Scientists in Utrecht, Holland, claimed to have built a room so free of noise that a person could hear his own heartbeat.
When Shepherd Ivory Franz
of the George Washington University Government Hospital for the Insane went to check it out (psychological investigations were to take place there, among other experiments), he was elated. Diagrams of the room Franz published in the journal
Science
depict what appears to be a box made of multiple frames resting on a fat plank. Lines radiate out from a list of materials in the middle of the box indicating the wall-within-a-wall layers of soundproofing each frame represents: korkstein, wood, lead, trichpiése (some kind of woven horsehair), porous stone, and air space. That’s not even to start on the sheet-lead-and-carpet buried floor. Franz confirmed that while it was true you might also be able to hear your own heartbeat in certain rooms that were
not
noiseless, this would only occur after “very violent exercise,” while in the Utrecht chamber all it took were “a few swings of the leg or arm” to make “heart sounds quite distinct.” So quiet was the room, he reported, that “one hears a subjective buzzing similar to but of less intensity than the buzzing produced by large doses of quinine.” (That buzzing was probably the same tinnitus-type noise that John Cage mistook for the sound of his nervous system more than forty years later when he made his famous visit to Harvard’s anechoic chamber, a special soundproof room designed to suppress
all reverberation.
“There is always something
to see, something to hear,” Cage wrote after this experience.) The lesson of the Utrecht room seemed straightforward: given sufficient layering and distance, you can kill any sound. But the pursuit of silence through soundproofing wasn’t only about piling one deadening material on top of another. There was also the quest for the one all-purpose, ideal soundproofing technique: the elixir of noiselessness.

At the close of the nineteenth century, Samuel Cabot, a Boston manufacturer, had discovered the power of cured eelgrass packed between thick paper sheets to stop sound by creating a
“thick, elastic cushion
of dead-air spaces.” Using the trademark name Cabot’s Quilt, he was soon boasting of the substance as the Green Glue of its day. “Every Hotel, Flat, Lodge, Hospital, School, Auditorium or similar building should be sound-proofed,” proclaimed one advertisement Cabot placed in a 1918 issue of the journal
Western Architect & Engineer
.
“If it isn’t sound-proof
it’s a failure. Cabot’s Quilt has made more buildings really soundproof than all other deadening materials combined.” In 1929 British engineers rediscovered Cabot’s product as their own invention. (The history of soundproofing is littered with instances of convenient forgetting.)
A captain affiliated
with the sound locators of the London Territorial Air Defence Brigades got credit in the
London Times
for realizing the soundproofing potential of this fireproof, nonverminous seaweed. Imported to Great Britain from Nova Scotia in the form of mats that were attached to ceilings and walls, it became the definitive sound absorbent for the quintessential silent institution: the English bank.

At a London trade show
in 1930, Trystan Edwards, a town
planner and architectural critic, exhibited a model for an entirely “silent house.” The house boasted a miracle door that could “even be slammed silently.” (Begging the question of the dangerous rage that might be provoked absent the satisfaction of that argument-closing clap.) Sir Banister Fletcher, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, lauded the idea and called for architects to consider it as they built near the loud, crowded thoroughfares of London.

On both sides of the Atlantic, anxiety about metropolitan population explosions helped drive the soundproofing renaissance.
Even the stolid United States
Bureau of Standards, concerned by studies that forecast a spike in the density of urban dwellings, jumped on the bandwagon of experimenters trying to devise a truly silent apartment. The bureau’s exhaustive tests of acoustic properties of different building materials led to the official proclamation that air space between the two halves of a compound partition was the most effective sound snuffer in the world.

Along with private homes and financial institutions, courtrooms, hospitals, and prisons were early beneficiaries of the advances in soundproofing. In the latter, soundproofing was brought in as a humane gesture to protect quieter inmates from noisier ones, as well as to cultivate religion. Not religion through silence, however.
A new chapel at Sing Sing
featured a breakthrough rolling soundproof partition that enabled it to simultaneously host two religious services, one Catholic and one Presbyterian.

From the turn of the century on up to the Second World War, optimism about the capacity of soundproofing technology to meet the challenges of the new, machine-driven din abounded. In a spring fever, the
New York Times
tied the prospect of new soundproof
spaces to amatory bliss:
“We don’t need any more
faculties for divorce. What we do need are a few old abandoned telephone booths large enough to accommodate two, fitted up with a rustic seat and sound-proof, where the city lover can sit undisturbed and repeat the old, old story that no age has been able to supplant.” More sober authorities, such as R. V. Parsons, an acoustical engineer with the New York City Noise Abatement Commission, which was established by the city health commissioner in 1929 and was the first such body in the nation, announced that
“Preventing noise
at its source and insulating against it are both possible now—not in some Utopian future.”

A few unfortunate members of the commission were tasked with measuring the efficacy of a soundproof room that had been developed in collaboration with Bell Laboratories against a biblical checklist of urban noise plagues. All day long, day after day, the experts huddled in this special chamber, blasted by one noise type after the next, gauging how well the room performed. Most wracking of all was a sound replicating the roar of heavy traffic
“punctuated by the penetrating
discord of sirens and automobile horns.” After health commissioner Shirley Wynne visited the room—bluntly labeled a “torture chamber” by one of those present—he left visibly shaken, deeming himself “a martyr to the cause of humanity” for having agreed to participate in the research.

Health benefits of soundproof buildings were being studied around the world just as the construction of such buildings was becoming logistically feasible. Sometimes the results of this research were surprising. The most curious finding emerged from a test begun in 1930 by
scientists from the Tokyo Hygienic
Laboratory. Doctors Fujimaki and Arimoto compared the physical
condition of numerous sets of white rats, half of which were raised in rooms protected from loud noises and half of which were raised in a noisy environment. In their first experiment, involving two groups of 20 rats, they discovered that rats raised under an elevated railroad over which 1,283 trains passed each day were more nervous, grew less, had higher infant mortality rates, lower fertility, and ate more frequently than their noise-proofed cousins. However, there’s a twist: nasty and brutish the lives of the noise-battered rats certainly were—but they were not especially short. At least not by white rat standards. In fact, the rats raised beneath the elevated lived a full 53 days
longer
in aggregate than those shielded from sound. Given that you’re talking a three-to four-year life cycle on average, an extra 53 days is nothing to wrinkle your whiskers at.

Fujimaki and Arimoto were startled and redid their experiment with other sets of rats, subjecting the noise-nurtured packs to other types of clamor. They raised one group of twenty white rats in the pressroom of the
Nichi Nichi
, a Tokyo daily, while housing the other set in a soundproof room. Another time, the noise rats went into a room where a bell buzzed continuously. On each occasion, the results were the same: the rats raised in noise were nervous wrecks with all sorts of collateral health problems—but they also lived considerably longer than their quiet-cradled kin.

What does this mean? Might it really be the case, as some present-day healers claim, that sound waves contain juvenating vibrational powers? God knows, but it raises the old question: At what price longevity? An extra 53 days or 1,283 trains per day overhead for your whole life? I’d opt for early checkout. Still, the
Tokyo experiment presented the researchers with a quandary. Perhaps there could be such a thing as too much soundproofing.