Elsevier

Endeavour

Volume 33, Issue 4, December 2009, Pages 141-147
Endeavour

Feature
When mobile communication technologies were new

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2009.09.006Get rights and content

In the 19th century, mechanical hearing aids opened up new possibilities for controlling sound waves and managing conversations. Components and ideals from these acoustical instruments became part of the foundation for electroacoustics, the conversion of sounds into “signals”. Mechanical hearing aids also set lasting standards for portability and unobtrusiveness in the design of personal communication technology.

Section snippets

Little telephones

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Wilson Ear Drum Company of Louisville, Kentucky began advertising “wireless phones” to the deaf readers of McClure's, Cosmopolitan and Popular Mechanics. The firm promoted its rubber inserts as “little telephones” and “listening machines”, capable of amplifying sound. The optics and acoustics of these devices were equally marvelous, as one ad affirmed: “They are so soft in the ear one can’t tell they are wearing them. And no one else can tell, either,

The long history of loud-speaking

In their survey of antique hearing devices, Mary Lou Koelkebeck, Colleen Detjen and Donald Calvert explain that fortuitous amplification long preceded custom-manufacture: standing beside a rock or a wall provided environmental magnification; fans, umbrellas, brimmed hats and, as rumor had it, Native American headdresses served as more portable “extemporized aids”.10

Trumpets for the ears

The mechanical hearing aids that proliferated in the 19th century were objects that incorporated and extended ideas about “normal” outer and middle ears. By then, hearing had been subdivided into “parts”; within the ear itself, it was clear that sound vibrations passed from medium to medium (air, eardrum, bone, fluid), being modified at each step. With this understanding, hearing was literally instrumental—it had become an active process.15

Voicepipes and conversation tubes

Other mechanical aids responded to the varied causes of deafness and the manifold ways to redirect sound waves. The conversation (or speaking- or hearing-) tube, comprised of a hose with a funnel at one or both ends, reduced the problem of background noise and allowed talk to be carried on with more privacy, at a comfortable distance.23

Vibratory communication

Another category of hearing aid was designed to be pressed against the skull or held between the teeth, exploiting the fact that bones conduct sound waves. Less common than the trumpet or the tube, “hearing fans” and “dentaphones” created a new channel for communication in cases of middle-ear deafness, directing sound to an intact auditory nerve via the skull. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a number of physicians, educators and deaf individuals separately noted that an object held between the

Invisible disability, transparent media

Acoustic instruments and hearing aid firms proliferated throughout the nineteenth century—matched by a rising emphasis on concealment. By drawing attention to communication, hearing aids provoked antagonisms between its visual and oral elements: some technologies were distracting or confusing, certain fashions obstructed function. Clearly, mechanical hearing aids also functioned as stigma symbols, marking the otherwise invisible disability of hearing loss.32

Histories of “new media”

In their conclusion to Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective, Manuel Castells, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey assert that “because the first users are the shapers of the technology itself, the youth culture and the professional culture have framed the forms and content of wireless communication”.39

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