taxi horn Archives - SqueezeHorns.com

12″ Straight Two-Toned Horn (More Photos)

Horns Attached!

Shout out to Jan who hipped me to a neat piece of kit readily available at most hardware stores. A ‘plumbing grounding saddle’ or ‘ground clamp’ served to get Jan’s horn firmly attached to their golf cart…

Here’s some close ups of a Pro Connex branded clamp I found locally. All the threads are 1/4″ course, so there are a ton of available screw types and sizes available for whatever application you might have. I’d also apply a little threadlocker on the screw that screws into the clamp.
In the photos I have the horn mounted at both the bulb and stem. The clamp itself has teeth, so I did notice some scuffing on the stem. Probably the best bet would be to sheath the stem with a rubber or plastic shim first.

Harpo Speaks!

Finally found a used copy of Harpo’s autobiography. A fun romp through early, poverty-stricken but full of get up and go New York Marx family childhood stories (Harpo was born in 1888!). Followed by years and years of pounding the pavement scratching out a living on the Vaudeville circuit. Finally a few breaks and steady theater success, and then Hollywood and the big time.
Here he details the birth of his trademark squeeze horn ( taxi horn). The show ‘Home Again’ puts this at around 1914.

Taxi Horns

Well known for its use in Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris’, I realized today I had no idea what in fact a ‘taxi horn’ was! If you Google it you’ll just get references to Gershwin, especially since the discovery that ‘we were doing it wrong’. (See my post here.) Consider that the horns Gershwin used were NOT what you’d typically find installed on an automobile by the manufacturer. (See vintage auto ‘bulb horns’, including many from French manufacturers here.) So what were they?

I turned to Google Books, sorted by date, and looked for references to ‘taxi horns’ from the early 1900s. Gershwin wrote ‘An American in Paris’ in 1928, and the thinking behind using taxi horns in the composition was to evoke the ambience of Paris.

Here’s what I think… In the 1920s, taxi drivers, especially in France, would sound a ‘taxi horn’ when arriving to pick up their fare.