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Chance Brothers Foghorn

Chance Brothers Foghorn

Re-Designing a Chance Brothers Foghorn

By Julian Walker - 23rd March, 2011

The first images that caught hold of my imagination when looking through material at the Sandwell archives were the foghorns manufactured by Chance Bros.  One particularly, the foghorn whose mouth is taller than the man standing next to it.  It’s a simple, wonderful, and slightly surreal piece of manufacturing, surreal because it is ‘over real’ – it is a horn, just a huge horn, attached to a small noise-creating apparatus, but on a scale of ‘small becoming large’ that caught me by surprise.

What a wonderful image to work with, I thought, an image that encapsulates the idea of sending a message across space and time, the past shouting out its demand not to be ignored.  Could we perhaps recreate this horn, and use it to bring the words of the past into the present.

The drawing may look straightforward, but it took four of us two and a half hours of folding, sticking, calculating, checking and rechecking, undoing, cutting up and resticking, to get a reasonably secure idea of how we might construct a foghorn that was originally about 4 1/2 metres long (about 15 feet) and 2.7 metres high (9 feet).

More entries soon with photos of the Foghorn being manufactured (in Sandwell of course!)

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