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Enticing Siren Songs to Warning Siren Sounds

In Greek myth, the sirens were women with the bodies of birds whose song was so alluring that it enticed men to their death. In the early 19th century, French engineer and physicist Charles Cagniard de la Tour built a device that sent blasts of air through perforated metal disks to make a loud, wailing noise. Having found that the device also produced sound even when submerged, he called his invention the sirène, the source of the English word for such a device, siren. This is part of a complete episode.

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