When the whistle blows Friday to kick off the opening match of the 2002 World Cup, two men on opposite sides of the Atlantic will be looking closely.
Not at the televised game. At the whistle, to see whether it has a pea in it.
To pea or not to pea is the question facing the World Cup's 72 soccer referees. A pea is the ball, nowadays made of chemically coated cork, that twirls within a whistle's chamber when blown. By their whistle choice, World Cup referees will be voting for Simon Topman or Ron Foxcroft.
Topman's J. Hudson & Co has been making the ACME Thunderer, the first whistle model to have a pea, in the UK since 1884.
Canadian former referee Foxcroft founded Fox 40 International in 1987 to make the Fox 40, the world's top-selling pea-less whistle, after a pea got stuck in his whistle while refereeing the 1976 Olympic gold-medal basketball game.
Each man says his product is the way to blow.
Sitting in his Birmingham, England, office, Topman leafs through a stack of graphs from the University of Birmingham's Acoustic Department, which tests the 83 ACME whistles Hudson makes. He says the graphs show that whistles with a pea require less effort, or "flow rate," to make noise, and that they cover a wider range of frequencies.
Using a pen, Topman holds down the pea on an ACME Thunderer and blows. The sound is loud but thin because, he says, it's limited to one frequency. When released, the pea spins in the chamber, interrupting the sound five times a second though the human ear can't discern the on-and-offs.
"It's easier to blow a pea whistle," said Topman, 38.
"Imagine you're a referee and you're almost out of breath just as you have to whistle for a foul."
That's hot air, says Foxcroft, 56, whose annual sales of US$29 million are triple those of Hudson's ACME whistles.
He went through 14 prototypes before introducing the pea-less product at the 1987 Pan-American Games in Indianapolis, Indiana.
To replicate the wide range of frequencies of a pea whistle, the Fox 40 has three air chambers, one underneath and two on top, each producing at a different frequency. Foxcroft chose the brand name because he had just turned 40.
"When you blow a pea whistle hard, the pea goes to the roof and gets stuck," Foxcroft said. "It gets wet, it gets corroded, it gets dirty and it gets filled with bacteria. We brought innovation to whistles."
Everyone has an opinion on whistles.
Arthur Smith, general secretary of England's Referees Association, says he's been using ACME Thunderer his whole career. "I've never had any problem with it," he said.
Gilles Veissiere, France's World Cup referee, says he switched to the Fox 40 as soon as it arrived on the French market about 15 years ago.
"With the old whistles, the cork could get stuck, or it would get wet from saliva or dry out," he said. "I'd find myself blowing rather than whistling."
Because referee whistles range from US$1.25 for a plastic one to US$8 for a brass-plated model, the choice of whistle isn't based on price. "It's a very personal choice depending on what sound you like," said Smith.
Joseph Hudson, a London toolmaker, is believed to be the first to put a pea in a whistle. He invented the ACME Thunderer in 1884 to distinguish the referee-produced sound from the company's one-tube whistle used by the London police force. Later models were used by officers on the Titanic.
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