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 Like a lot of other products of the industrial age, the steam whistle was invented by the British but was really improved upon and developed technologically by the Americans. Credit for it's invention goes to Adrian Stevens of South Wales, England. The exact year of its invention is not well known but it is presumed to be around 1835, One of the first American industrail catalogs that shows steam whistles was published in the 1860's by a company in Haydenville, Mass called the Hayden-Gere Company
which also apparently produced a wide variety of brass plumbing fixtures. By the 1870's the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and other companies were springing up to accommodate the growing need for boiler room fixtures.
Companies like Crosby Steam Gauge, Star Brass, and American Steam Gauge and Valve Co. in Boston, Lunkenheimer
and Powell Valve Co. in Cincinatti, Buckye Brass Works in Dayton Ohio, and the Crane Co. of Chicago evolved and produced a variety of plumbing fixtures, valves, gauges, lubricators and other items designed to accommodate the "Steam Age" and its boilers and steam engines. These companies all produced whistles but generally only to complement their complete line of boiler and steam fittings.
When the term "steam whistle" comes up, most people will automatically think of the whistles on steam locomotives. This was in fact one of the first uses of the steam whistle as a warning device to warm traffic at railroad crossings. However, as the industrial revolution progressed and manufacturing and mechanized agriculture flourished, practiclly all machinery was steam powered. Before long, everything that was mechanized had boilers and steam whistles.
Factories used whistles to announce the beginning and ending of shifts. Steam tractors used whistles to call for more coal or water. Ships used whistles signal other vessels.. Even small machine shops and foundries used small whistles as signals of various sorts. Some specialized whisltes were used as fire alarms and some were used on steam powered fire engines.
By the late 1800's for every steam whistles that existed on locomotives there were probably 200 whistles on factories ships tractors and stationary steam engines.
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