In 2005, on the quiet suburban streets of Merthyr Tydfil, a jarringly uncomfortable noise begun outside a shop. It was pulsing four times a second at a frequency intended only to be detected by young people – roughly those aged between 13 and 25. This was the ‘Mosquito’, a soon-to-be controversial sonic weapon and security device invented by Howard Stapleton, created with the intention of preventing young people from loitering.
Just a few days earlier, Stapleton’s daughter had walked to the shop and been harassed by a crew of teenage boys. Furious, he went to see the shopkeeper, who, in turn, knowing that he worked in security, asked Stapleton for assistance with what he described as an ongoing problem. Searching for a solution, he turned back to childhood.
‘As a kid, I did factory tours with my dad, who was the chairman of Eveready,’ Stapleton tells me. ‘They used a method called ultrasonic welding to adhere plastic components and torches together. I went into a room, aged 13 or 14, where they were using this technique and it cut right through me. It was horrendous.’
Stapleton returned home and, using an old electronic device called a 555 timer, perfected the prototype Mosquito by using his teenage children as guinea pigs. Days later, the man who describes himself as ‘academically useless but with a very odd head for remembering things’ installed the country’s first Mosquito outside the very same shop where his daughter had been pestered. A few years on, his weapon was in commercial use across the UK, outside fast food outlets, betting shops and the homes of NIMBYish curtain twitchers or legitimately exasperated citizens, whichever way you want to look at it. Stapleton estimates he’s now sold 10,000 units in the UK, retailing at around £500 each.
The Mosquito was designed in the mid-2000s, a time when moral panic about teenagers and delinquency was driven into Britain through both the media and state policy. In 2005, Kent’s Bluewater Shopping Centre made the decision to ban any customer from wearing a hoodie. This was also the decade of the ASBO, Tony Blair’s anti-social behaviour deterrent that banned people, usually youngsters, from places they were deemed to be causing trouble.
Confronted with the Mosquito, teenagers around the world learned how to use it to their advantage, making it, according to Stapleton, ‘one of the most popular sounds in the world’. But it cost him untold millions: ‘If I’d obtained the royalties that I should have been paid, I’d have been living next to Mr Branson on a Virgin Island,’ he says. ‘As far as we can work out, a teenager went up to a store where they were running the Mosquito, recorded a 30-second clip, looped it and then put it out on social media.’ At one point, it was the most downloaded ringtone in history. This cultural moment is archived on YouTube in the form of pre-2010 videos titled things like ‘Mosquito Ringtone – The One Teachers Can’t Hear’. KFC also adapted the Mosquito, paying Stapleton a royalty fee to use the tone on an advert in America. The premise was that if you could identify where the tone appeared in their ad, you could go on their website and they’d send you a voucher. American prisons also approached him to use the Mosquito to develop a sound grenade to use when younger inmates were causing trouble, but ‘Mosquito had caused enough problems without stoking the fire to that extent,’ the inventor adds.
Howard Stapleton is a jovial, eccentric character on the phone, more than happy to talk about his product at length and also fiercely defensive of it – to be expected, since the Mosquito was met with strong opposition from the very beginning. In 2008, the civil rights group Liberty declared the weapon degrading and questioned the demographic-specific mechanism of the machine. ‘Imagine such a device applied to people of one race or gender and ask what position they would take,’ said Shami Chakrabarti, then a director at Liberty (now a peer). A campaign was launched in Corby called Buzz Off, one that had some success, as all devices in the local area were reportedly switched off and some major companies agreed to stop using them. Stapleton doesn’t think the criticism – that the Mosquito targets and demonises young people indiscriminately, irrespective of whether they’ve done anything wrong – is fair.
‘The point I always made is that if a Mosquito is being used, the kids can leave the area, walk away from it. It’s not Guantanamo Bay where they’re chained up in a steel container being played Teletubbies on a loop. They can simply walk away.’
