5 ms·

During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of

During the early industrial revolution people used to present themselves for medical help after complaining that the incessant repetitive action and rotation of engines (e.g. beam engines) hundreds of miles away from them was sending them vibrations which disturbed their sleep. Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers.

userbinator 1y ago
Something similar happened in more modern times with a cell tower, although it's over a decade ago now: https://gizmodo.com/locals-complain-of-radio-tower-illness-then-discover-5448889 https://gizmodo.com/locals-complain-of-radio-tower-illness-t...
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Various double-blind studies involving cell-towers also show no effect. Of folks claiming some kind of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the greatest sensitivity seems to be whether they can see if a power-light is on or not. Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
  - squid_ca 1y ago
    And power lines. I seem to recall reading that some of the health problems may have come from Agent Orange, which was used to clear the power corridor in the 50s
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    For the longest time I believed that cell tower radiation’s negative impact on living organisms is strictly pseudoscience. Turns out, back in 2016 a German study[0] has found damage to trees near the towers—starting on the side of the tree facing the tower, then spreading to the entire tree. This study, of course, does not show whether that measurably harms humans, but I stopped thinking those fears and complaints are completely unfounded. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552133/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552133/
    - notachatbot123 1y ago
      The study's author is a well-known esoteric loonie. You are better of not trusting that study. Context in German: https://www.psiram.com/de/index.php/Cornelia_Waldmann-Selsam https://www.psiram.com/de/index.php/Cornelia_Waldmann-Selsam
      - strogonoff 1y ago
        Interesting, thanks for context. Then, was this particular paper not peer reviewed or did it use suspect methodology?
        pfdietz 1y ago
        Peer review doesn't guarantee much of anything, unfortunately.
        CamperBob2 1y ago
        PubMed is highly problematic in that regard. It means basically nothing in terms of quality or quantity of peer review, but the "nih.gov" part of the URL automatically lends an air of real authority to any link that contains it. I don't know what you have to do to get a link on PubMed, but it definitely isn't much.
        strogonoff 1y ago
        This is interesting (and unfortunate). It boggles my mind how academia makes it possible to publish (and not have to retract) a paper based around facts that are simply made up[0], while some bright and capable people I know don’t have ways to publish (unless, I suppose, they pay to some lesser pay-to-play journals) because they did not choose to be in academia. [0] Although I have not seen anyone in this thread tell me that this paper is false—it was mostly appeal to author’s preexisting reputation—I’m taking it at face value.
- kjs3 1y ago
  There is a dedicated group of people who believe any electromagnetic emission is affecting them negatively. Searching on "electromagnetic free zones" is quite the rabbit hole. And there's way more to them than the "5G is mind control forced on us by the Illuminati for the New World Order" crowd.
  - drunkonvinyl 1y ago
    They definitely should not own one of these then: https://somasynths.com/ether/ https://somasynths.com/ether/. But it is lots of fun for me.
  - antod 1y ago
    I met a new age architecture consultant (not an actual architect) back in the 90s that was convinced his bag of Epsom salts and a copper spring was protecting him from the cancer causing electromagnetic fields produced by house wiring.
  - eru 1y ago
    What's funny is that you can make a defensible argument that COVID caused 5G. (Basically, everyone was even more chronically online during the lockdowns, so there was extra money to be made and extra urgency in rolling out telecommunications infrastructure.)
  - dwd 1y ago
    The Parkes radio telescope had issues with fast radio bursts that they couldn't attribute to what they were tracking. Turned out to be a microwave oven in a nearby building where the door was opened before it had stopped. While I wouldn't subscribe to standing in front will cook you idea, opening the door prematurely does give off radiation. Standing in front of a microwave beam dish may be a different story - knew an ex-Telecom tech who told a possibly tall tale of cooking chicken. https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-mystery-signals-at-the-dish-41523 https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-m...
    - mister_mort 1y ago
      The Telecom guy might have been pulling your leg, but microwave dishes are known to be dangerous if you're in the wrong spot in front of them. (The traditional story is that Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket get melted by the radar set he was working on. However, the effect had been demonstrated at least a decade earlier.)
cobbzilla 1y ago
Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when it’s quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5 miles away. It wouldn’t surprise me if the beam engine was louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much though.
- mannykannot 1y ago
  I too can hear distant trains at night, especially if it is a still, clear night creating a low-level inversion to channel the sound. There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
- tharkun__ 1y ago
  Train at 5 miles is nothing. Can confirm. There are confounding factors of course, like direction and what's in between. E.g. do you sleep in a room that's on the opposite side of the house with windows closed and good insulation/windows? You'll probably be totally fine. Do you sleep in a room that's towards the source and with the window open? Oh you will very very much hear that train, especially if the wind is coming from that direction. Sleeping outside? Oh you will very much hear that train!
- spauldo 1y ago
  The engine would have been significantly less noisy than a diesel locomotive. It's almost eerie how quiet they can be, given how big they are. The pump it drove could have been loud, though.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    If the train is moving at the right speed the carriages will hit any bump in the track at a frequency that resonates. You get the same effect over a smaller area with vibratory compactors used in construction. Get the frequency just right and the whole neighborhood can feel it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
wrp 1y ago
I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  It’s tempting to see it as people being hypochondriacs, but often when there is an issue only after learning about it you notice that it has been affecting you badly. Noise pollution and air pollution are but two most common examples. Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours. Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change. Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8
  - wanderingstan 1y ago
    To anecdotally support this, a neighbor of mine likes to play their bass super loud at night sometimes. But what’s strange is that the sound is louder in my house than if I go out in the street to listen. Seems like the sound waves go through the ground and then use my house as a sounding board.
    - 972811 1y ago
      this can definitely happen, and in weird ways too. i thought my neighbor was playing bass super loud at night, and it was reverberating loud enough in my home so that I couldn't even hear a movie in my living room. when I knocked on his door, I was surprised to hear almost nothing and he had just been cooking dinner with low volume music. he shifted his subwoofer about 3 feet (it wasn't even against the wall) and it completely solved the problem
MangoToupe 1y ago
> Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers. Sadly the memories of having worked with the machines persists
- cindyllm 1y ago
  [dead]
musicale 1y ago
Now we live in obnoxiously loud cities with 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens (hey! there's an emergency somewhere!), loud aircraft flying overhead at all hours, loud low-frequency rumbling from ground vehicles, jet engines, power plants, and all manner of machinery, loud hums from electrical equipment, etc. Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep. Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable. And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.
- Lammy 1y ago
  > Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum
nickdothutton 1y ago
I should add that it was not the sound that was disturbing them, these engines were sometimes on the other side of the country. It was the "unnatural", unending reciprocating motion of the things!

userbinator 1y ago

Something similar happened in more modern times with a cell tower, although it's over a decade ago now: https://gizmodo.com/locals-complain-of-radio-tower-illness-then-discover-5448889 https://gizmodo.com/locals-complain-of-radio-tower-illness-t...

Terr_ 1y ago
Various double-blind studies involving cell-towers also show no effect. Of folks claiming some kind of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the greatest sensitivity seems to be whether they can see if a power-light is on or not. Some may have real symptoms, but the cause is something else inside or outside them.
- squid_ca 1y ago
  And power lines. I seem to recall reading that some of the health problems may have come from Agent Orange, which was used to clear the power corridor in the 50s
- strogonoff 1y ago
  For the longest time I believed that cell tower radiation’s negative impact on living organisms is strictly pseudoscience. Turns out, back in 2016 a German study[0] has found damage to trees near the towers—starting on the side of the tree facing the tower, then spreading to the entire tree. This study, of course, does not show whether that measurably harms humans, but I stopped thinking those fears and complaints are completely unfounded. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552133/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552133/
  - notachatbot123 1y ago
    The study's author is a well-known esoteric loonie. You are better of not trusting that study. Context in German: https://www.psiram.com/de/index.php/Cornelia_Waldmann-Selsam https://www.psiram.com/de/index.php/Cornelia_Waldmann-Selsam
    - strogonoff 1y ago
      Interesting, thanks for context. Then, was this particular paper not peer reviewed or did it use suspect methodology?
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        Peer review doesn't guarantee much of anything, unfortunately.
      - CamperBob2 1y ago
        PubMed is highly problematic in that regard. It means basically nothing in terms of quality or quantity of peer review, but the "nih.gov" part of the URL automatically lends an air of real authority to any link that contains it. I don't know what you have to do to get a link on PubMed, but it definitely isn't much.
        strogonoff 1y ago
        This is interesting (and unfortunate). It boggles my mind how academia makes it possible to publish (and not have to retract) a paper based around facts that are simply made up[0], while some bright and capable people I know don’t have ways to publish (unless, I suppose, they pay to some lesser pay-to-play journals) because they did not choose to be in academia. [0] Although I have not seen anyone in this thread tell me that this paper is false—it was mostly appeal to author’s preexisting reputation—I’m taking it at face value.
kjs3 1y ago
There is a dedicated group of people who believe any electromagnetic emission is affecting them negatively. Searching on "electromagnetic free zones" is quite the rabbit hole. And there's way more to them than the "5G is mind control forced on us by the Illuminati for the New World Order" crowd.
- drunkonvinyl 1y ago
  They definitely should not own one of these then: https://somasynths.com/ether/ https://somasynths.com/ether/. But it is lots of fun for me.
- antod 1y ago
  I met a new age architecture consultant (not an actual architect) back in the 90s that was convinced his bag of Epsom salts and a copper spring was protecting him from the cancer causing electromagnetic fields produced by house wiring.
- eru 1y ago
  What's funny is that you can make a defensible argument that COVID caused 5G. (Basically, everyone was even more chronically online during the lockdowns, so there was extra money to be made and extra urgency in rolling out telecommunications infrastructure.)
- dwd 1y ago
  The Parkes radio telescope had issues with fast radio bursts that they couldn't attribute to what they were tracking. Turned out to be a microwave oven in a nearby building where the door was opened before it had stopped. While I wouldn't subscribe to standing in front will cook you idea, opening the door prematurely does give off radiation. Standing in front of a microwave beam dish may be a different story - knew an ex-Telecom tech who told a possibly tall tale of cooking chicken. https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-mystery-signals-at-the-dish-41523 https://theconversation.com/how-we-found-the-source-of-the-m...
  - mister_mort 1y ago
    The Telecom guy might have been pulling your leg, but microwave dishes are known to be dangerous if you're in the wrong spot in front of them. (The traditional story is that Percy Spencer noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket get melted by the radar set he was working on. However, the effect had been demonstrated at least a decade earlier.)

cobbzilla 1y ago

Loud low sounds can travel very far, especially at night when it’s quiet. I can hear freight trains at night that are over 5 miles away. It wouldn’t surprise me if the beam engine was louder than a freight train, and that nights were even quieter in the early 20th century. Hundreds of miles is a bit much though.

mannykannot 1y ago
I too can hear distant trains at night, especially if it is a still, clear night creating a low-level inversion to channel the sound. There are several places in Britain (and elsewhere, I imagine) where beam engines have been preserved and are periodically run using live steam. the engines themselves are quiet by modern standards, though I believe the machinery they drove often produced a racket.
tharkun__ 1y ago
Train at 5 miles is nothing. Can confirm. There are confounding factors of course, like direction and what's in between. E.g. do you sleep in a room that's on the opposite side of the house with windows closed and good insulation/windows? You'll probably be totally fine. Do you sleep in a room that's towards the source and with the window open? Oh you will very very much hear that train, especially if the wind is coming from that direction. Sleeping outside? Oh you will very much hear that train!
spauldo 1y ago
The engine would have been significantly less noisy than a diesel locomotive. It's almost eerie how quiet they can be, given how big they are. The pump it drove could have been loud, though.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  If the train is moving at the right speed the carriages will hit any bump in the track at a frequency that resonates. You get the same effect over a smaller area with vibratory compactors used in construction. Get the frequency just right and the whole neighborhood can feel it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

wrp 1y ago

I know a consulting acoustical engineer who tracks down noise problems for companies and individuals. He goes on about the difficulty of even finding the source of low-frequency noise because of distance and vague directionality. In an extreme case, a rural family was tormented by a constant throbbing sound that turned out to be from a utility station 5 miles away.

strogonoff 1y ago
It’s tempting to see it as people being hypochondriacs, but often when there is an issue only after learning about it you notice that it has been affecting you badly. Noise pollution and air pollution are but two most common examples. Sure, positive mindset is important, but it can only take you so far when northern wind makes you cough because there is a dozen factories out there, or when you are chronically sleep-deprived because a noise source you might not even know exists switches on at ungodly hours. Low-frequency sound waves can be brutal. Something can just happen to resonate where you are, but meters away everything is fine. To make things even more interesting, go low enough and you might not actually be hearing it per se, but feeling it with your body. Good luck explaining it to people who can enact change. Relatedly, Benn Jordan investigated[0] certain sound that some refuse to believe is real yet others suffer from. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zy_ctHNLan8
- wanderingstan 1y ago
  To anecdotally support this, a neighbor of mine likes to play their bass super loud at night sometimes. But what’s strange is that the sound is louder in my house than if I go out in the street to listen. Seems like the sound waves go through the ground and then use my house as a sounding board.
  - 972811 1y ago
    this can definitely happen, and in weird ways too. i thought my neighbor was playing bass super loud at night, and it was reverberating loud enough in my home so that I couldn't even hear a movie in my living room. when I knocked on his door, I was surprised to hear almost nothing and he had just been cooking dinner with low volume music. he shifted his subwoofer about 3 feet (it wasn't even against the wall) and it completely solved the problem

MangoToupe 1y ago

> Of course they only started having this problem after reading about such contraptions in newspapers. Sadly the memories of having worked with the machines persists

cindyllm 1y ago
[dead]

musicale 1y ago

Now we live in obnoxiously loud cities with 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens (hey! there's an emergency somewhere!), loud aircraft flying overhead at all hours, loud low-frequency rumbling from ground vehicles, jet engines, power plants, and all manner of machinery, loud hums from electrical equipment, etc. Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep. Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable. And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.

Lammy 1y ago
> Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum

nickdothutton 1y ago

I should add that it was not the sound that was disturbing them, these engines were sometimes on the other side of the country. It was the "unnatural", unending reciprocating motion of the things!