In 2012 Milton's Bells was contacted to see if we would be interested in donating one of our vintage Milton Bells to be used in a Super Bowl TV commercial. We were told that the commercial would be advertising the new 2012 Chevrolet Corvette and would be submitted, along with several others, to compete for air time during the 2012 Super Bowl. Naturally we were very excited to participate and loaned one vintage bells for the spot.
The commercial was shot in Shamrock, Texas and opened with panaroma of this classic art-deco gas staion on old Route 66.
A vintage Corvette, that seemeds to be driven a ghost, pulls into the gas station at night. As it slowly rolls to a stop it drives across the bell ringer tubing, rings the signal bell waking the gas station attendant. "Ding-Ding"
A close up shot of the old gas pump shows the dials turn as the car mysteriously fills up.
Just as soon as the car has filled its tank it miracuously transforms into a brand new 2012 Corvette and speeds off. The surprised gas station attendent to run outside just in time catch a glimpse of it all. In the end the commercial did not air during the Super Bowl but we were very excited to be a part of it. It brought to life a great old gas station and piece of Route 66 history and, of course, features one of our vintage Milton bells. It can be viewed here on our site and on YouTube.
Milton's Bells has strong ties to the trucking industry. Our products are used at intermodal truck terminals, at truck at scales, loading docks, equipment yards, and even at the entrance of several oil fields. Alerting people to newly arriving vehicles is our business.
Milton's Bells has teamed up with a company called EzLogit.com which has created a smartphone application designed to record and track the daily activities of commercial truck drivers.
Every commercial truck driver with a commercial drivers license (CDL) is required by the Department of Transportation (DOT) to track their daily driving activity. Truck drivers must record things like their starting location, the time spent driving or time spent in the sleeper berth. These requirements are designed to ensure that drivers aren't driving without taking proper rest breaks and to ultimately promote safety.
The EzLogit.com smartphone app. electronically records all of the required daily log information needed by the Department of Transportation (DOT) electronically.
Every driver operating a commercial motor vehicle must track his duty status for each 24-hour period. The driver must record the city, town or village (or truck stop, highway milepost or intersection) when reporting for work, starting to drive, on-duty but not driving or released from work.
The duty status grid must list one-hour increments including "12 noon" and "12 midnight." It must include when the driver was on duty, on duty but not driving, off duty other than in a sleeper berth, off duty in a sleeper berth, driving and on duty but not driving.
In addition to the duty status grid, the daily log form must include: date, daily miles driven, vehicle number, carrier name, driver's signature, 24-hour starting time, main office address, comments, co-driver's name, total hours and shipping document numbers or name of shipper and commodity. The driver's activity record must use her workplace's time zone, be legible and in the driver's handwriting. The seven or eight day time period for the driver retaining the log begins from the workplace.
Employers must keep drivers' duty status records (and other supporting documents) for six months. Drivers must carry a copy of their duty status records for the previous seven days and produce them for inspection. Drivers also must give or mail their original duty status records to their employers within 13 days of completing them. If a driver works for more than one employer in a 24-hour period, he must give a copy of his duty status record to each one. The record must account for all time during the 24-hour period and include the name of the employer during period and the beginning and ending time for each employer. Drivers working for more than one employer must report their total time on duty during the previous seven days to prevent exceeding the allowed work periods.
Milton's Bells is proud to have teamed up with EzLogit.com to support a very user friendly and effective smartphone app. that ultimately promotes driver safety.
Here is a fun article that features one of our products published in mental_floss by Kara Kovalchik.
Who knew that some noises could eventually become as extinct as the passenger pigeon? Depending on your age, you or your kids or grandchildren may have only heard some of the following sounds in old movies, if at all.
1. Rotary Dial Telephone
The formerly familiary swooosh as the caller rotated the dial clockwise to the “finger stop” and then the click-click-click as the dial returned counter-clockwise to the start position is now a novelty application that you can install on your iPhones for nostalgic yuks. Adolescents waiting in line nearby will wonder what the heck that sound is, while we older fogies will know you’re poking fun at us and our ancient ways.
2. Manual Typewriter
Manual typewriters had an entire subset of unique sounds that made them immediately identifiable…at one time. The keys clacked loudly as they struck the paper, the carriage lifted up with a distinct clunk when the shift key was employed, and then there was the ping of the bell warning you that you were nearing the end of the line. That meant you had to lift your left hand from the keyboard and swipe at the carriage return lever, which caused a sort of ziiiiip noise as you pushed the carriage back to the starting position.
3. Coffee Percolator
If steampunk had an aural definition, it would be the bloop-hissss of an old school coffee percolator.
4. Flash Cube
The loud rapid-fire click-clack of an Instamatic camera equipped with a flash cube was a common background sound at any social gathering in the 1960s. It was a technological breakthrough to be able to snap off four – count ‘em, four! – photos in rapid succession without having to pause and install a new flash bulb after every shot. Even back then your crunchy granola types were concerned with the amount of waste used flash cubes created, so it became a common holiday craft project to repurpose the used cubes into trendy Christmas tree ornaments.
5. TV Channel Selector
When announcers of yesteryear used to admonish viewers, “Don’t touch that dial!”, they were referring to the channel selector knobs found on TV sets. The standard TV dial went from 2 to 13, and you had to click on each number as you searched for one of the three channels that broadcast in your area. That meant a lot of clunk clunk-ing interspersed with the static-y sound of “snow” on the blank stations. Listen to this old Muntz after it’s first switched on and you’ll hear another antique sound, the soft buzzzz of the picture tube warming up.
6. Record Changer
Record changers allowed you to stack a selection of albums of 45s (seven-inch singles, not guns!) for your longer-term listening pleasure. Each record would make a soft slap sound as it dropped onto the turntable, a series of clicks followed as the remaining records adjusted into place and the tone arm swung over and lowered the needle into the outer grooves of the record. You’d hear the slightest scritch noise as the stylus settled just so into the vinyl and then (finally!) the music began.
7. Gas Station Driveway Bell
Back in the days when all gas stations were full-service, the thin black pneumatic hose that snaked across the pavement was as familiar as the fuel pumps. When vehicles drove over the hose, a loud bell ding-dinged! inside the station, alerting the attendant that he had another customer. You can hear one at MiltonsBells.com and even order one for your home driveway if you really dislike your neighbors.
8. TV Station Sign-Off
Before infomercials were invented, television stations actually went off the air for a few hours each night. Some of us TV-holics experienced physical withdrawal symptoms when we heard the announcer intone, “We now conclude our broadcast day…” around 2AM or so. The format varied little from station to station across the country; first a few technical details were announced (broadcast frequency, physical address of the station, etc.), then a reading of “High Flight” followed by the National Anthem, and then the steady beeeeeeeeeeeeeep tone of the test pattern.
9. Cash Register
Those chunka-chunka push buttons were clumsy, but (unlike the fellow in this video) veteran cashiers could check you out just as fast with these old-style machines as their modern counterparts do with today’s scanners.
10. Film Projector
One of the jobs of the classroom A/V squad captain was to run the film projector on movie days. The rapid tick-tick-tick of the sprockets really was that loud and usually accompanied by shouts of “Turn it up!” and, of course, “Focus!”
11. Broken Record
Remember when you’d beg mom over and over for something and she’d finally yell, “You sound like a broken record!”? She wasn’t referring to pops or hisses, but the repetitive effect that happened when the needle got stuck and played the same few notes over and over and over again… like at the 1:00 mark of this clip:
If you’re not afraid of revealing your true age, let us know how many of these you remember from your past!
While listening to the Rush Limbaugh show I was reminded of personal security, preventing theft and of a system that is capable of providing an early notification in the event of an intruder.
Naturally, I was expecting the radio commercial to be advertising some type of driveway signal bell system. After all this is what we sell, and our alarms do promote personal security and help to prevent theft by providing an early notification of a potential threat each time they ring......"Ding-Ding".
The actual commercial was promoting a service to protect your personal identity and its ability to deliver an early warning alert via email in the event of an actual identity theft. There were enough similarities between the keywords that they used to describe their product and those to describe one of our driveway alarm bells to confuse anyone who was casually listening in.
The similarity in the keywords got me thinking of how much things have changed from the simple days of the gas station bell. It made me nostalgic for those days when "identity alert" meant that the gas station attendant was annoyed enough to run off me and my friends riding our Sting-Ray's and Huffy's back and fourth across the black rubber hose at the corner gas station.
