Doctor Who: 10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About The TARDIS

5. The TARDIS Sound Has Strange Origins

Speaking of the TARDIS's iconic vworpvworp-ing, many don't actually know how the sound was originally created: by scraping a house key over piano wires. Brian Hodgson, a BBC Radiophonics Workshop sound engineer in 1962, was faced with the confounding task of figuring out what exactly a time machine would sound like. According to Hodgson, he wanted a sound that would reflect the time-space fabric through which the TARDIS journeys, a sound that would "go everywhere all at once", in the manner of the Doctor's vessel. With that in mind, Hodgson used his mother's front door key to scrape the bass strings of an old Sunday school piano and then slowed and sped up that sound, cutting them together and adding feedback to create the perfect sound to truly mirror the TARDIS's rather unique travelling experience. Again, it seems rather reflective of the TARDIS herself, and Doctor Who in general, that an element of science fiction that has nearly reached the status of a legend was born out of a few things that seem, to the rest of us, perfectly ordinary.