There was a time when nobody had ever heard a bell ringing

There was a time when nobody had ever heard a bell ringing. There are no bells in nature. People had to make them. And that wasn’t going to happen overnight.

I imagine that people were long familiar with the idea that if you strike something, it could make a sound that was interesting for its qualities and for how much sound it made. Hitting a hollow log with a stick is something a lot of people discover. But one doesn’t get to bells until civilization has started to make metals, and that didn’t happen until a handful of millennia ago.

Human societies have been moving through time, with SOUND a part of the drama.

People got into drumming with what was available to them Skins on drums. Sticks on logs. Making sounds by striking things could serve as one of their languages.

But no bells until there’s metallurgy.

One of the human stories of how, when more materials become available, people put the new materials to old uses. The old purpose of percussion led to the discovery that banging metal can make a new sound. Finger-cymbals, gongs.

People bang on things, and they learn by trial and error how the sounds they like can be produced. Drums, xylophones, wood blocks– all the products of that learning experience. People learned that the SHAPE of their new metal objects mattered to the sound that was created.

Over long stretches of time, people learn to make things “bell-shaped” to get a desired PURITY of sound, and to get the kind of resonance that makes it loud and strong. (Just as people learned what shapes worked for string instruments, so that the bodies of violins and of guitars have much in common.) Some of the advances were likely made by chance – it happened to work – but some humans probably saw the direction the shapes had to evolve to get what they wanted.

A well-designed bell could send its voice further than other sounds that people had been able to make. Light can be seen at a great distance, but only if the line of sight is unimpeded. But sound has the advantage that it can travel to places from which the source cannot be seen. Drumming can carry pretty far, but drumming can’t summon people to church from as broad an area as a bell being rung from a church tower.

Before the technologies of radio and telephones and such, the technology of the bell would have been part of a revolution in long-distance communication. It could summon people to worship, sound an alarm in times of danger, mark occasions of celebration or mourning, and call people together for the things that bound their lives in common.

People invent new things, but even the inventors cannot know what roles their innovations will play as history unfolds. Thousands of years ago, the first people who created metal from ore – and those later who first made Bronze Age swords – probably never imagined how the technology of metallurgy would eventually provide a language of mass communication.

We, of course, take bells for granted—something that we associate strongly with the world of the past. We inherit a world full of human creations whose origins have disappeared from view. We are born into the world of the bell. But we are still part of the unfolding evolution of human technology. With something new – like presently with the major breakthrough of AI – we are like those first metallurgists who didn’t know their successors would usher in the Bronze Age, and would someday make church towers in New England one of the means of summoning the people to participate in their collective spiritual practices.