In Pursuit of Silence (29 page)

Inundated by letters of support from public officials and private citizens alike, Rice felt empowered to create an organization that would extend the battle to a widening array of targets. Weeks after her victory, she and Isaac hosted a gathering in the soundproof library of Villa Julia at which a roster of city dignitaries applauded the founding of the society.
Rice was voted
its president in an election at which she cast the only dissenting vote.

She had hit upon a formula for fighting noise that worked. Its essence was encapsulated in her initial statement to the press. “This is not,” she declared, “to be an anti-noise society. Much noise is, of course, unavoidable.” True to the name of her organization, Rice and her cohorts would tackle only “unnecessary noises.”

Her crusade coincided with an intense wave of global interest in maximizing energy efficiency. The same year that Rice founded the society, William James published an essay titled “The Energies of Men,” in which he declared that we labor under “an imperfect vitality,” failing to properly tap resources of energy that, if we could but access them, would vastly enhance our capacities of work and thought. Noise—the squeaky brake, the grinding gears, the needless whistle blast, friction in all its guises—meant squandered energy.

Rice thus approached the problem as a friend to leaders of the business and industrial communities whom, she averred, were laboring under the illusion that noise was an essential part of progress. Rather than aestheticizing or sanctifying silence,
she equated it with the well-oiled, smoothly operating machine. Quiet and profitability rose and fell together.

Moreover, just as the economic sin of smoke made for a visible index of waste, Rice held the evil of noise to be acoustically self-evident. She developed a “graphophone” that
reproduced the noises
of the city with impressive fidelity. Instead of lengthy explanations as to why certain noises were unnecessary, she simply played them back. This was enough to convince many of their pointlessness.

The next major target of Mrs. Rice’s society was the area around hospitals. Armed with letters from physicians and hospital administrators attesting to the retarding, wasteful effects of noise on the healing process, she set about creating the precursors of today’s
hospital quiet zones
. Fifty-nine hospitals representing some eighteen thousand hospital beds joined her directorate. Yet despite manifold abatement measures, Rice discovered that the hospital zones remained noisy. Further investigation revealed that much of the sound came from children who loitered about hospitals to indulge what Rice called
“that deplorable craving
for excitement” which sought gratification “in the sight of poor, wounded, ‘ambulance’ cases.” She made a minute-by-minute record of the problem. (“3:50
PM
—Eight or ten boys hanging about the east gate calling to servants. Pretending to be injured, they walked down into the yard toward the accident entrance. Pounding on fence with baseball bats.”)

Rather than having the little ruffians frog-marched down to the police station—Rice pitied their lack of adequate playgrounds—she launched another brilliant PR ploy. In the spring
of 1908, Rice formed the Children’s Hospital Branch of the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noises. After consulting with physicians, she gave a series of talks to upward of twenty thousand children in which she spoke about the suffering caused to hospital patients by noise. She begged the young people to assist her in alleviating this distress. In exchange for promising not to play within a block of a hospital, nor in front of a residential dwelling in which someone was known to be seriously ill, she offered them official membership in the newly formed auxiliary branch of her society. To help jog the children’s memory as to the fact that they were now part of the solution, she issued them all badges and requested that the badges be worn whenever they were playing outside. The badges were stamped with one word in black:
HUMANITY
.

This campaign proved successful as well, and soon Rice had accumulated a mountain of pledges from the city’s children, such as the following heartrending testimonial: “
I promise not
to play near or around any hospital. When I DO pass I will
keep my mouth shut tight
, because there are many invalids there. Nor will I make myself
a perfect
NUISANCE.”

The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noises went on to win other signal victories. Rice became an inspirational figure for antinoise movements across Europe, as well as in the United States. Yet for all her acumen, the series of successes doesn’t quite tell the whole story. If it did, the society itself would not have fallen silent in the early 1920s. What happened? The gradual withdrawal of Rice’s own energies as she grew older certainly
took its toll. Yet if the logic of her broader argument against noise was sound, why should her personal leadership have proven indispensable? After much searching I came across one explanation for the society’s demise, buried in a 1928
New McClure’s
magazine article announcing that war on noise had been declared yet again: the society’s
“efforts were baffled
,” the article’s writer declared, “by the introduction of the automobile.”

Julia Rice’s own husband, Isaac, was reportedly
the first private
individual in New York City to own an automobile. He was a trendsetter in the fad that would ultimately unravel most of his wife’s efforts to bring quiet to the metropolis. Indeed, Mr. Rice called it a
“high-handed outrage”
when New York City park commissioner George Clausen revoked his permit to ride it through the serene expanse of Central Park. Rice viewed freedom of choice about his means of conveyance as a basic democratic right. While his wife was chastening tugboat captains around Manhattan’s perimeter, Rice was shattering the peace at the island’s heart.

Moreover, for all that Isaac and Julia were quiet-loving patrons of art and music, they counted among their children some of the city’s loudest, most reckless daredevils.
Their daughter Dorothy
became the first woman in New York to speed through the city in a motorcycle, and started a craze among the female fast set for racing their snorty machines around town. Another daughter became one of the first female pilots.
One madcap flight
ended with an eight-hundred-foot plunge into the water off the shores of Babylon, Long Island. With the long fur coat she
was wearing over her aviation suit, it was no easy process disentangling her feet from the wreckage, and from her hospital bed she pronounced the whole escapade “very funny.”

Were the Rices’ autos, motorcycles, and aeroplanes, and the vogues they helped ignite, sources of necessary noise? Surveying the history of the Rice family and noise, I thought of
King Lear
: “Reason not the need.”

But still, the campaigns mounted by Rice’s society were impressively effective for as long as they lasted. Why the initial wave of support for them? Each new offensive was founded in a scrupulous exercise in noise measurement.

Sound measurement also underpinned the next great wave of antinoise initiatives. When cities around the world issued declarations of war against noise in the 1920s, the spurs to battle were often new measurement technologies, such as the Bell Laboratories audiometer, billed as the world’s most scientifically accurate sound-measurement device. With one ear naked to the environment and the other fitted to an earpiece connected to the machine, the audiometer’s operator turned a dial, thereby amplifying a buzzing sound until that noise was intense enough to mask the noise of the surroundings. The number at that point on the dial became the noise rating for a given location. It thus became possible for the first time to definitively establish the loudest spot in a city. In New York in 1926, this was determined to be the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, where the noise intensity was measured at
“fifty-five sensation
units above quiet.” According to Dr. E. E. Free, a scientist who studied
and wrote about noise under the auspices of the journal
Forum
, this degree of intensity meant that to communicate with someone at that corner, “you must shout as loudly as you do to a person who is more than half deaf.” One wonders what the audiometer would have revealed four years later when excavation for the Empire State Building began half a block away.

Though this was still not the most objective calculation, it began to change the standards of how the level of sound was quantified. In 1929, when health commissioner Shirley Wynne established the Noise Abatement Commission, engineers traveled the city with what Wynne called
“a strangely fitted
noise measuring truck, the first roving noise laboratory.” The truck covered more than 500 miles and made 7,000 observations at 113 locations around the city, recording everything from “the quiet of remote residential streets to the din of main highways,” using the decibel unit. This marked the first broad application of the noise-measurement scale we continue to rely upon. Today, though, what we’re using it for is making noise maps.

Noise maps represent the future of the pursuit of silence through policy. Millions of euros and hundreds of thousands of pounds have already been invested in them. But no one seemed able to explain to me what a noise map was. Was it an actual map that showed noise sources or noise levels? When I talked to Jim Weir, a products manager at Brüel & Kjær, a Danish company at the vanguard of acoustical measurement, the closest he came to a definition was to say that it involved
“environmental noise monitoring
of an entire city.” He told me that noise mapping had been
around for years at airports. Well, what did the maps set out to accomplish? I asked. “The FAA fines airports for noise,” he said.

“So the maps help airports deal with noise pollution?” I ventured.

The maps did help reduce sound, Weir said. Equally important, they reduced complaints. His voice dropped to a conspiratorial register. “I’ll tell you what I discovered,” he remarked. As far as airport management is concerned, “the pretty charts with color profiles, the ways that noise is presented with pictures and overlays, is
more
important than the microphones.” He knew of cases where airport noise had ceased to be a problem the moment the public saw a map of it. “The knowledge of measurement happening can be more important than the measurement,” he observed.