When Football Officials Tooted on the Field

Officials have whistled football plays dead for many years, but whistles were not used when the game of football began, largely because whistles as we know them did not yet exist. Low volume whistles go back to ancient times, but they could only be heard at limited distances. That changed in the early 1880s when England’s Scotland Yard published a request for a noise-making device to replace the hand rattles policemen used to call for support. The request led Joseph Hudson to invent the first effective pea whistle which could be heard a mile away. Scotland Yard adopted Hudson’s Acme whistle in 1883 and the whistles quickly saw use in soccer and rugby matches. American football adopted whistles in 1887 to signal fouls and to stop plays. (Before then, the tackled player yelled "Down" to stop play.)

The problem, of course, was that officials blew their whistles both to stop play and to signal fouls which were not supposed to stop play. Confusion ensued with players on defense sometimes hearing a whistle and stopping play, while the offensive players played on, scored touchdowns, and then declined the penalty on the defense.

This continued for seventeen years until 1904 when new rules called for the referee, whose job was to monitor the progress of the ball, to use the whistle to call the play dead. The umpire, meanwhile, went whistle-less and used a bell or horn to signal penalties. Unlike the whistle that stopped play, the umpire’s signal meant play should continue.

The use of bells by umpires never caught on, but horns did. Period photographs show some umpires holding bulbed horns similar to those on bicycles. Most umpires wore small horns that worked and sounded like a kazoo on wristwatch-like straps. Despite the difference in sound between the whistle’s tweet and the horn’s toot, some players kept hesitating or stopping play when they heard the horns.

Football Official's Horn And Wristband, c. 1930

Another sound maker entered the fray in 1924 when the timekeeper began using a starter’s pistols to signal the end of each quarter. Though it added another audible signal, the pistol was used only after the last play of a quarter was declared dead, so it did not interfere with play. The pistol became redundant when scoreboards with running clocks became universal and the pistols were dropped from use.

A Sound Alternative

One plan to resolve the toot-tweet problem came from H. L. Williams, Minnesota’s Hall of Fame coach. He suggested a flag-based system in 1917 to both signal penalties as they occurred and to communicate the nature of the penalties to the spectators after the play. His system was a combination of the flags used by soccer referees as well as the military semaphore systems of the time, but it is unclear whether Williams’ flag system was ever used in a game.