Key Takeaways:
- The first known hearing aid start4ed in the 17th century, known as the ear trumpet.
- Next came electric hearing aids, with Siemens as one of the first companies to make this technology around the dawn of the 20th century.
- Hearing aids continued to evolve into vacuum tube hearing aids, devices worn in the pocket, transistors, and body-worn devices.
- In the early 1980s, digital hearing aids hit the market, paving the way for the development of today's smaller, more advanced hearing aids.
Hearing loss has been around as long as mankind but it wasn’t until a few hundred years ago that people began to experiment with treatment. Buckle up, we’re going to take a look at the history of hearing aids from acoustic thrones all the way to artificial intelligence.
The first hearing aid, called the ear trumpet, was created in the 17th century.
Ear trumpets became increasingly common between the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1800 a London man named Frederick C. Rein created the first commercially available line of ear trumpets.
Later, Rein was commissioned to create a custom acoustic throne for King John VI of Portugal. His subjects would shout into the holes in the armrests.
In the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone jumpstarted a new era in hearing aid devices.
Bell's new phones could control the loudness, frequency, and distortion of sounds. This new technology was used to create the first electric hearing aid, called the Akouphone, in 1898.
Siemens was one of the first manufacturers of an electric hearing aid, and their hearing aids were notoriously bulky and not easily portable. Eventually, the electric hearing aid was small enough to fit in a purse or briefcase.
In the early 1920s, Navel engineer Earl Hanson patented the first vacuum tube hearing aid.
The innovation allowed hearing aids to get significantly smaller through the 1920s and 1930s. The industry-leading vacuum tube hearing aid created by Hanson initially weighed 7 pounds.
The first hearing aid with gain control arrived at the height of World War II, in 1935.
This hearing aid was the first device that allowed the sound output to be altered based on a patient's needs.
Military technological advances in World War II helped the development of hearing aids get smaller through miniaturization techniques. This evolution is evident in Zenith's pocket-sized Miniature. Can we bring back this rocker aesthetic?
