E. D. Bullard Co.
| E. D. Bullard Co. | |
| Company | E. D. Bullard Company |
|---|---|
| Produced | 1930's - 1940's |
| Type | Electromechanical |
The E.D. Bullard Company is a manufacturer of sirens that produced many different sirens throughout the 1930's and 40's. Based out of San Francisco, California, the company has been a manufacturer of industrial safety equipment since 1898. Just before and during WW2, they were contracted to make a variety of air raid and police sirens, some of which still survive to this day. While the company no longer makes sirens, the company is still around in 2022, making industrial safety equipment. The company was named after its founder, Edward Dickinson Bullard, and was formed in 1898. The company originally started with gold and silver mine safety equipment, and is credited with the invention of the hard hat in 1919. In the late 1930's, when WW2 was just beginning, the War Production Board contracted the company to create air raid sirens to defend the public from air raids.
Bullard created a variety of different sirens, including a 12-port chain-driven rotational siren, a dual rotor 6-port siren, small vertical sirens, as well as a variety of police and emergency vehicle sirens. Bullard even created a large gasoline powered siren in partnership with Chrysler around 1941, and was the earliest iteration of what would later become the Chrysler Air Raid Siren. This 12-port gasoline siren was Bullard's very first attempt to meet the War Production board's requirements, and was deemed a failure and scrapped. Bullard's sirens can be told apart from every other siren manufacturer by their distinct conical rotors and stators. This design helped project sound forwards. The vast majority of Bullard's sirens are 12-port single tone, but some came in 6-port single tone as well. No dual tone Bullards are known to exist. E.D. Bullard also created coded variants of their sirens, including a dual rotor siren that uses a rotating stator ring that when powered, covers all of the ports and nearly silencing the siren instantly. This allows the siren to produce coded pulse signals. These units were 6-port single tone. These were mainly meant for use in fire stations, and none are known to still exist.
After the war ended, sales of Bullard's sirens slowed as companies such as Federal Electric were proving dominant in the siren market across the United States. The company was never able to extend their range beyond California and the immediate surrounding states (and Hawaii), leading to the company ending production of their sirens sometime after 1945. After the war, most of the Bullard sirens continued to be used as air raid sirens during the Cold War, with the increasing threat of nuclear war requiring them. They were often supplanted by Scream Master, Biersach & Niedermeyer Co. Mobil Directo, B&M sirens, and Federal Signal SD-10's. Once the Cold War ended, nearly every E.D. Bullard was finally disconnected as Californian cities decommissioned and abandoned their sirens. Many have since been removed, and today Bullard's sirens are quite uncommon. Very few active units exist, with one vertical unit known for being used as a drawbridge siren and several Model 3H27 "Weltex" units in Oregon and Ohio.
Model 3H27
E.D. Bullard also manufactured a siren without a conical rotor and stator, the Model 3H27. These are more commonly known by siren enthusiasts as "Weltex" sirens (it is unknown where this name originated), and are largely exclusive to the U.S. state of Oregon. These small omnidirectional sirens came in 9-port and 12-port single tone, and are very small motor-over-rotor vertical sirens with the motor on top and the rotor on the bottom. A cylindrical motor cover protects the motor, and is the same width as the stator. These sirens were available with a skirt to help project the sound outwards as well as a cylindrical mesh intake, and are suspended from below by a pair of metal supports on one side of the siren. The motor horsepower and decibel rating of these sirens are currently unknown, but they are confirmed to run on three-phase power.