Clever klaxons

The blasting air horns so beloved of truck drivers can burn out easily if used too long and too loud. But Wolo Manufacturing in Deer Park, New York, has a cunning plan: replace air horns with tape recordings of their sound (WO 02/070302). A 40-second recording of a conventional air horn is recorded at CD quality and stored in a memory chip. A timer circuit is programmed to repeat the recording at a rate that mimics a honking driver. The playback is fed through a powerful amplifier and heavy duty speaker. So the driver can still scare the wits out…