Four times every weekday Big Jim refused to be ignored, to the consternation of many
By Tim Gilmore
“UNNECESSARY NOISES SHOULD BE ABOLISHED,” the headline shouted in all capital letters on January 27, 1914, such noises delivering “Severe Shock to Neurasthenic Patients.” The latest bulletin from the Florida State Board of Health lamented “automobile beaus” who ran their “auto engines” late at night “when returning the girl home.” The section called “Church Bells” began with the sentence, “There’s another useless noise.”
Big Jim, the bulletin explained, was “the pet name for a great brazen-throated steam whistle” at Jacksonville’s waterworks, “which is sounded four times every weekday to announce the beginning and ending of work hours at 7, 12, 1 and 5 o’clock.” Additionally, when fire alarm call boxes rang the fire department from any street corner, Big Jim answered, and “day or night, this great deluge of noise is poured forth on an innocent public.”
Big Jim had whistled through his gullet since 1890, a decade after, as T. Frederick Davis wrote in his 1925 history of the city, “John Einig of Jacksonville made it with his own hands out of sheet copper.” Einig named it for his brother-in-law, Jim Patterson, and patented the design. In fact, other sources attest, Patterson built the whistle.
Einig built steam whistles for boats and ships as a hobby, but the city had no steam source big enough for the whistle until the Jacksonville Waterworks installed new boilers beside the electrical plant in 1890. Einig began work for S.B. Hubbard, hardware, in the 1870s, retired as vice president, and died at 57 years old, two years before World War I, in 1912. In honor of John Einig’s death, Big Jim bellowed over the city for one full minute.
Six months before the start of World War I, three years before America’s entry, the Board of Health reported, “We are a nation of nerve-wracked people. Any extreme noise aggravates such persons.” The bulletin considered “the strong, rugged city man,” tragically “compelled to seek rest in his annual vacations in order to ward off the breakdown, and he seeks it in the quiet of the country where he may escape the noise, which has worn him perilously near to the breaking point.”
One-third of city-dwelling Americans, the Board of Health said, suffered from neurasthenia, a term used by late-Victorian alienists and early 20th Century psychologists for a condition that included headaches, high blood pressure, fatigue, depression and anxiety. In the 1880s and ’90s, European medical writers began referring to neurasthenia, a condition to which Americans in particular seemed susceptible, as “Americanitis.” Just after the turn of the 20th century, Rexall Drugs started marketing a product called “Americanitis Elixir” for “nervous prostration” and “nervous derangement, exhaustion and debility.” It was 15 percent alcohol and contained chloroform.
Big Jim, argued the Board of Health, had served Jacksonville as its alarm clock for too long. In fact, the board believed, the relationship was the other way around. The city served the whistle. Big Jim demanded citizens get out of bed, get to work, go to lunch and finish lunch. It informed nervous urbanites “when (but not where) the fires were.” People depended on Big Jim blindly and believed him indispensable, when really he was “a relic of the village stage of Jacksonville’s development.”
The Board of Health failed to mention that Big Jim sounded the clarion on May 3, 1901, the dawn of the Great Fire, which decimated the city. Four years after the hysterical bulletin, Big Jim blasted a fanfare for the armistice that ended World War I. It had ballyhooed the ignition of public electricity in the city in 1895, electric lighting having first lit the St. James Hotel downtown in 1893 and blinked on down Bay Street two years later. The city ignored the Board of Health’s call to quiet Big Jim and managed somehow to survive.
In early November 1933, nearby residents had complained to the Jacksonville City Commission, hoping to shut Big Jim’s mouth, but the City decided “half as long a whistle would do,” and shortened the steam blast to 15 seconds. By the time Big Jim trumpeted the peace at the end of World War II, it was back to 30 seconds.
On September 10, 1971, Big Jim went silent. At first, almost nobody noticed. The Associated Press remembered the recent “clamor to keep the whistle working in 1966, when the steam boiler in the old water works in downtown Jacksonville went out of service and Big Jim was due to be retired.” Since the whistle “required two men to handle the operation,” the Jacksonville Electric Authority had decided to automate it and almost nobody noticed when Big Jim went silent during the transition. Personally hurt, JEA Managing Director Lou Winnard said, “We had only three telephone calls in protest.” The JEA had moved the whistle to the Southside Electric Generating Plant, where it continued to mark time the city’s metronome, its timepiece.
In 2001, Big Jim came home. The JEA shut the switch on the Southside Generating Station, opening up riverfront land for redevelopment, and moved Big Jim back to the old Waterworks Building. Now a “garage-size set of equipment” would move a rotor fast enough to shoot “shock waves through water.” Countless minuscule bubbles instantly form and pop and blast heat through the old copper windpipe.
By the time lightning struck Big Jim in 2012 and silenced him until 2013, Springfield had fallen back in love. “In Springfield,” says Kiley Secrest, “We love Big Jim. Everyone in the neighborhood uses it as an added guide for time. We’ve been hearing that same sound for over 100 years.”
Phillip Heilman had “never heard anything like it before moving to Springfield,” though it “provides a sense of timeliness to the day.” Often when Heilman hears Big Jim, he “spends a few moments considering people starting another day, breaking for lunch, or going home for the evening.”
Drew Edward Hunter says, “I. Love. Big. Jim! He’s one with Springfield. Long may he sound!”
