The old thunderer

Tiny Tuesday: Metal - the old thunderer

You may be most familiar with the Acme corporation as the fictional corporation that made all the useless gadgets employed so prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons.  It was an ongoing joke - you could absolutely rely on any gadget or gizmo produced by the Acme corporation to fail or backfire catastrophically at the worst possible time. 

If so you might be slightly surprised to learn that an early global Acme brand name was the "Acme Thunderer" whistle made from 1895 onwards by J Hudson & Co in the USA.  You are probably familiar with the piercingly loud whistle though, from your school days when teachers on playground duty would blow them loudly when some inappropriate behaviour needed to be stopped.  They were of course widely employed by referees.

This one is my Dad's.  I haven't yet had the chance to ask him whether it was his, or whether he inherited himself.  Back in the day, when I joined the cub scouts, Dad used to drop me off and collect me and some of my friends.  After a while he somehow got inveigled into joining up himself and became a cub scouter.  Long after I had moved up to the scouts, and my brother had decided that scouting wasn't really for him,  Dad was still turning up for Tuesday night cubs where he used to teach knots amongst other arcane scouting law ;-)

If you had ever met Dad you would know that he's pretty mild mannered and probably the last person in the world to blow a whistle, so if this one went off, you would really be in trouble.  I've certainly never heard or seen him blow it in anger.

So there we have it, the great unused Acme Thunderer sleeping still ....