The Odyssey

The Odyssey is really the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and his attempt to make it back home to Ithaca after the war was over. Since it involved a long journey filled with adventures, it has given us the English word Odyssey with the same meaning. In the 1800s when a Frenchman named Charles de la Tour invented a device that made a piercing tone, it was soon adopted by ship captains who used it as a type of warning signal on the water. The distracting sound harkened back to the distracting sound of the sirens and even though this new sound was piercing it came to be known as a siren which is often used today by police cars and emergency vehicles