As a young child, echoes fascinated me and my friends. We would find little nooks and large rooms to produce echoes. When my mom packed up the travel van one summer and took me on a drive across the U.S., Canada, and straight up to Alaska (long before the Alaskan Highway was paved), I found echoes all across the country.
I don’t know if echoes are a thing among children anymore, but people from over a hundred years ago found echoes entertaining. From a newspaper in 1904:
ECHOES OF THE WORLD
In Many Places Sounds Reverberate in a Most Wonderful Manner
The suspension bridge across the Menai Straits in Wales produces one of the most remarkable echoes in the world. The sound of a blow with a hammer on one of the main piers is returned in succession from each of the cross beams which support the roadway, and from the opposite pier at a distance of 567 feet, in addition to which the sound is many times repeated between the water and roadway at the rate of twenty eight times in five seconds.
An equally remarkable echo is that of the Castle of Simonetta, a nobleman’s seat, about two miles from Milan. The report of a pistol is repeated by this echo sixty times.
A singular echo is also heard in a grotto near Castle Comber, in Ireland.
In the garden of the Tuilleries, in Paris, is an artificial echo, which repeats a whole verse without the loss of a single syllable.
Another wonderful echo is heard outside the Shipley church, in Sussex, which echoes some twenty syllables in the most perfect manner.
The well-known echo at Woodstock repeats itself no fewer than fifty times.
In one part of the Pantheon so great is the echo that the striking together of the palms of the hands is said to make a report equal to that of a twenty-pound cannon.
Source (1904, January 29). Echoes of the world. The Rice Belt Journal, p. 7.
