Barbara Wallace
My sister Kathleen was the first person I knew to own the perfectly-pitched Hammacher Schlemmer Sleep Sound white noise machine. In the 1980s in NYC, she lived on 47th Street across from an abandoned school yard where drugs were sold and a block from the insistent traffic of Broadway, in a building where a man kept pigeons on the first floor – inside his apartment.
I was the second one in the extended family to buy the Hammacher Schlemmer Sleep Sound white noise machine - for $49.95, a fortune at the time - and luxuriate in its two speeds and wholesome mechanical sound. No buzz of electronic noise, no extra choices for rainfall or night forest, just the pure white hum of a tiny fan. My husband got used to it, then addicted to it and has now been forever ruined for silent sleep. As have I.
Once, before the advent of portable, battery-operated sound machines (poor substitutes for the Hammacher Schlemmer Sleep Sound), we tried sleeping in a tent to the white noise at the end of the radio dial only to be jolted awake at 5 am by a French Canadian station starting its morning news. When our children were born, a second Hammacher Schlemmer Sleep Sound was purchased and then a third.
My sister Jeanne got one, then my sister Mary, and when Mary purchased a big house, she bought one for each guest room, so that when you walked down the hall at Thanksgiving, the sweet whirr of Hammacher Schlemer’s round box drifted from under each door. It’s like we were helping them breed.
Oh, we’ve tried others. Everyone in the family has a white noise app for emergencies, but all of them have a tinny-ness, a thinness to them. You can find mechanical knock-offs, shaped the same way, maybe even with an approximation of the elegant up/down, two-speed button on the side, the one you fumble for in the night when the electricity goes out and for a moment you think it’s just the Hammacher Schlemmer Sleep Sound that was accidentally clicked off. But, when I wander the silent house waiting for the power to return, I only want to crawl back inside the glorious noise of this white round box.