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But antinoise activists worried it was a tacit acknowledgment of defeat.

Dr. Rice lobbied Congress to pass one of the earliest antinoise laws, one that prohibited “unnecessary” steamboat whistling that could “murder sleep and therefore man.”

Especially galling, Mrs. Cunningham and other antinoise advocates say, is the fact that while helicopters are used by a tiny sliver of those who journey to the Hamptons — a one-way ride costs thousands of dollars — they cause disproportionate widespread misery.

Opponents of the antinoise campaign criticized Lessing and his supporters as hypersensitive fanatics resisting progress.

He writes about John Connell, a British antinoise crusader in the mid-20th century, who came up with a “rubber-lidded dustbin” to muffle the sound of early-morning trash collections and who succeeded temporarily in halting night flights from Heathrow Airport.