Fire Alarm bells a relic whose time has come

The Fire Alarm Bell at one time almost every Fire Alarm and Burglar Alarm utilized them they where loud and efficient and as you can see in the picture to the left just sat there quietly awaiting its duty above the fire panel waiting to be activated.
well that's the problem while the bell is sitting in standby as low as this one is when it was examined I found that some one had stuck a piece of gum under the clapper keeping it from operating properly.
in some cases I have found the entire gong loosened or even removed and missing worse yet is when people paint the gongs despite the do not paint sticker and it deadens the sound,the unfortunate problem with bells is they can be easily tampered with and you do not know they have been unlike Fire horns and strobes which can be tampered with but not as easily.
At This point I only have a couple customers with bells and they are high enough up they can not be easily messed with but all the lower ones have been replaced because of the danger of some one tampering with them.With all the new technologies out there bells have all but become obsolete except for use for alerting when stand alone sprinklers activate which are not attached to a fire system Which now many modern codes are calling for Horn strobes and the occasional existing old fire system which should be being updated. Yes at one time everyone knew what the bells stood for when you practiced a fire drill at and marched to its beat. This is where March time encoding came from when in old AC only Fire Systems you would count the bell beats to tell where an alarm was coming from such as 3-2-2 or 3-1-2 etc
it would tell you where the alarm had activated but with modern remote annunciators now with English language bells are no longer needed. But there still something about the bell on a responding fire truck that still comes to mind when I was a kid. plus hearing bells go off at the fire station but today they are a relic and only a couple manufacturers even make them any more.