Full of bells and whistles
I’m watching a show on the Discovery channel about cars in the future. It’s a fairly good show. Then I hear it, this engineer type says something about the car filling with all the “bells and whistles”.
So, this gets me thinking. Most little sayings like that come from the past. Exactly how long ago was it, and what item would have been augmented by the addition of bells and whistles? Since this guy was talking about cars, let’s say that it is from the early 1900’s. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t remember seeing any Model-T’s with bells or whistles.
They had horns.
But maybe that is the point, the Model-T didn’t have all the bells and whistles. So it had to be something else that early in the 1900’s that had an extensive list of bells and whistles as optional equipment.
I think fire trucks had, and still have at least one bell, but that to be would not be all the bells, and maybe the men on the truck had whistles, but not all the whistles.
So, forget about what all the bells and whistles did come on, and let’s figure out what use they would be to some things like:
Cars: You could use them as warnings, set the bells to go off when you leave the keys in the ignition. That would probably be nicer to hear than the electronic chimes that most cars have today. Whistles could be used in place of the horn.
Pager/cell phone: You could have some source of compressed air, or portable air compressor hooked up to a whistle, and then select that as your ring tone. It would be really bulky and impractical, but it could be done. But then that would be only one whistle, not all of them. Maybe you could rig up a manifold with electric solenoids to an array of whistles. You would then have polyphonic whistle tones, but that might increase your need for compressed air, and your phone may now be the size of a small suitcase. At least with Bluetooth technology you wouldn’t have to hold it up to your head. All this and you still have no bells.
Pants: I suppose you could attach a bunch of bells to your pants. I think I have seen this done in parades and at Marti-Gras or somewhere. But I have never heard of anyone stating that their pants had all the bells and whistles.
I could go on, but I realize that I have another problem. Exactly how many are all the bells and whistles?
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