Hearing Aid History
Hearing Aid History:
It seems hearing aids have been around forever, there is evidence that the Vikings used hollow animal horns to gather sound and transmit it to the ear.
The people using the horns may not have been hearing impaired but used the horn to amplify animal sounds to aid in their hunting endeavors.
At some point early on the hearing horn was used as an aid to the hearing impaired and became very popular in the 17th century with ornate trumpets made from wood, shell and metals such as tin, copper, silver and later hard rubber known as vulcanite.
These horns were often painted black to match the mode of the day and to be less conspicuous. A fellow named Duguet is credited with inventing the acoustic chair around 1706 and by 1819 King Goa of Portugal had and acoustic throne built by F.C.Rein & Son.
If you spoke to the king you got down on one knee and talked into the armrest, the whole throne was basically a hearing trumpet, it worked but it wasn’t very portable.
Hearing trumpets are still manufactured in parts of Eastern Europe. A breakthrough in hearing aid history came with the advent of the carbon microphone pioneered by Alexander Graham Bell.
With the addition of a three or six volt battery, the carbon microphone became available as a table model hearing aid at the end of the nineteenth century and a few years later was made small enough to be truly portable, although far from discrete.
A practical vacuum tube model was introduced in the early 1930’s and for the first time was powerful enough to correct even severe hearing loss.
The transistor was invented in the late forties and showed up in a few hearing aid models by the early fifties. Within a year transistors had totally replaced vacuum tube models and the era of true electronic hearing aids had begun.
In 1980, two the first digital sound processors became available and by 1988 it was unsuccessfully incorporated in to a hearing aid which was much too large to be viable and didn’t sell.
It wasn’t until 1996 that a small fully digital hearing aid became available that could be worn behind or even in the ear. Hearing aid technology is evolving to this day with surgically implanted units that stimulate either the middle ear or even the inner ear.
With computer aided design allowing for smaller and smaller units, a complete hearing aid history cannot yet be written.