Discover the Hidden Function of a Strange Wall Find
September 28, 2024
source: Reddit
How about when you knocked on your grandparent’s door and the sound managed to reverberate throughout the entire house? There has to be something about remarkably refined bell that takes us to another century —a century when no one had to text message or call but expect something to occur. Oh, I still recall walking into an old family house, the kind with large rooms and little secrets that other people could never know. However the thing that caught my fancy most as a child was the iron tricky on wall which once used to summon a servant in a time long gone by.
From Georgian and Victorian styled houses, for instance, such bells were standard fittings. Many of them were elaborated in the walls of dining halls, bedrooms, and parlors, and empowered the elite to summon their servants by simply snapping their fingers. Picture a society where it’s not just a house where people live, but a house that is a machine, and everyone and everything is intensely engaged in doing what is expected of them when a lever is pulled, or a button is pressed. The bell would ring in the servants’ rooms or in the kitchen to receive a response for what the household requires.
These bell systems were not merely opulence conveniences or instruments of entertainment in the facilities that linked them: They were symbols of the social previlege,Everyone could see them,but no one could do anything about it,because the hierarchy of the society of the XIX century was well established. In a world where servants were present and dwell within the kin of the served but were only visible whenever called into service, such bell systems confirmed the existent quasi-sep nosed between those who were being served and the servants themselves. But there’s a kind of beauty in the mechanism of the thing—a beauty which returns us to a world before buzzers and intercoms, a world where every ring told a story of a household and its schedules.
Bell pull designs in the Georgian period were complex and their hangings were as carefully sited as their employment. The handle you discovered behind your wall was most probably a component of this more extensive network; one that ran over the house and facilitated interaction. The 90-degree rotation of the lever likely tripped a wire system to ring a bell far away. And the soft sound is also conceivable which once guided the traffic of the home, the faint ring that can still be heard.
These systems also tell us a lot about the culture of that period. For the upper classes, it was about ease and authority – to maintain a vast home as efficiently as possible without disturbing one’s day. For the servants it was time to come out; every ring was their cue to emerge from the background and start serving. Indeed, it was more than a bell used to announce the time; it was part and parcel of the rhythm of the home.
At this point however, what may be perceived as unique about these servant bell systems is not the technology involved or the standing they afforded. It is the way they humanise history they learn and discover. Standing in a Georgian mansion today and then looking at one of these bells makes modern life look historically surreal. You can imagine the barely audible treads on the hard polished wooden floor, can feel the looks that a butler gives a maid and vice versa as they work. Despite the fact of being non-functional the bells resonate as if they have earful of tales to tell.
Instead, those artifacts serve the purpose of teaching people the necessity of community. For all the opulent mansions which were constructed through the gross exploitation of the servant population, successful communication remained paramount. But there is something romantically satisfying in an old styled system that used a soft ring tone to tie two individuals together and today a flashed message on phone can get to anyone.
So if by any chance you get to meet any of these old levers or bell pulls in your future journeys, you better remember them or their stories. They are meaningful symbols of a world that is in a hurry, but where every noise has its reason and time is measured hour by hour.