The Siren Board

Can anyone shed light on this?

I've seen the term 'FEDELCODE", but have no idea what it means.

According to LIFA, FEDELCODE stood for Federal Electric Company, taken from the first few letters of each word. Federal Electric Company. However, I dont know where the DE came from.

Fedelcode sirens had brakes and shutters so that the siren signal could be controlled in bursts of sound. This way a coded signal could be sent out, like Box 5-2-3. In the days before widespread radio, this is how volunteers would know where to go, since a city would be divided up into boxes for every pull box, street corner, or major occupancy, etc. Some cities, like New York, still use the box system for locations. One World Trade Center was Box 8-0-8-7, and Number Two was 9-9-9-8.

The Code in FEDELCODE could have to do with a "code" of some sort.. However, I never saw a Fedelcode siren with breaks or rotor dampers yet.. I did see a Code Damper on a 1960 Federal 7 HP but this is after the Fedelcode era..

Sometimes in name shortenings like FEDELCODE for example, you have FEDELCO which is the 'abbreviation' of several words and to make it sound complete you might just add a couple of meaningless characters in there, DE for example making FEDELCODE.

Just a thought.

My guess is FEDeral ELectric CODE siren. I'm not sure, however, that all Fedelcode sirens have a coding mechanism.