Bells and whistles refers to non-essential but often engaging features added to a piece of technical equipment or a computer program to make it seem more superficially attractive without enhancing its main function. The phrase is actually quite modern and may be a product of the American military. At least, one of its earliest appearances was in an article in Atlantic in October 1982, which said it was “Pentagon slang for extravagant frills”. There’s some evidence that the term has actually been around since the 1960s, but the early evidence is sparse. Where it comes from is still a matter of learned debate. A literal sense of the phrase appeared around the middle of the nineteenth century, referring to streetcars, railways and steamships. Before modern electronics, there were really only two ways to make a loud warning noise — you either rang a bell or tooted a whistle. Steam made the latter a real power in the land (anybody who has heard the noisy out-of-tune calliope on the steamboat Natchez at New Orleans will agree about its power, though less so about its glory). And at one time “clang, clang, clang went the trolley” in large numbers of American cities. At least some early US railroad locomotives had both bells and whistles, as this extract from an article in Appleton’s Journal of 1876 shows: You look up at an angle of sixty degrees and see sweeping along the edge of a precipice, two-thirds up the rocky height, a train of red-and-yellow railway-cars, drawn by two wood-burning engines, the sound of whose bells and whistles seems like the small diversions of very little children, so diminished are they by the distance.
I am told that the bells and whistles on locomotives were used for different signalling purposes, so that both were considered necessary, though not strictly essential, parts of its equipment. It may be that the coiners of the phrase had this in mind. Indeed, it is sometimes said that the term arose out of model railway societies, where to have a layout in which locomotives had their bells and whistles meant that it was fully equipped down to the smallest detail, and thus one up on enthusiasts who didn’t have them. Further support for this idea came from Ed Kemmick, who pointed out that an inverted form of the phrase is in a song by the American bluesman Blind Willie McTell, Broke Down Engine Blues No. 2, recorded in New York City in 1933. The relevant part of the lyric is this:
Feel like a broke-down engine, mama,
ain’t got no whistles or bells.
Feel like a broke-down engine, baby,
ain’t got no whistles or bells.
If you’re a real hot mama,
come take away Daddy’s weeping spell.
This may just be an accidental similarity of usage, but it does seem to show that at this date bells and whistles were linked especially to railway locomotives. However, it’s more probable the slang sense of the term comes from that close musical relative of the calliope, the theatre organ. Extraordinary instruments such as the Mighty Wurlitzer augmented their basic repertoire by all sorts of sound effects to help the organist accompany silent films, among them car horns, sirens, and bird whistles. These effects were called toys, and organs often had toy counters with 20 or more noisemakers on them, including various bells and whistles. In the 1950s, decades after the talkies came in, but while theatre organs were still common in big movie houses, these fun features must have been considered no longer essential to the function of the organ but mere fripperies, inessential add-ons. It’s possible the slang sense grew out of that. It got taken up especially by the computing industry, perhaps because opportunities to add them are so great.
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