First Electric Hearing Aid
Posted by fookembug on June 27, 2007
First Electric Hearing Aid - Some claim that Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, developed in 1876, was conceived as an electric hearing aid for his mother. The first electric hearing aid may have been the Akoulathon, designed in 1898 by Miller Reese Hutchinson of the Akouphone Company in Alabama. The carbon transmitter was enlisted for uses such as the telephone and the electric hearing aid, which became commercially available in 1898. Hearing aids make sounds louder, either by mechanically funneling sound to the ear more directly or by electronic magnification. The first amplified hearing devices contained a battery-operated carbon transmitter and earphones. In 1898, the Akouphone Company marketed a carbon table model hearing aid that sold for $400. The carbon-type hearing aids gave amplification near the low end and the middle speech frequency range. The carbon transmitter was replaced by the vacuum tube in the 1920’s, and later produced the first transistor-based hearing aid. Smaller, more powerful and stable, all electric hearing aids used today are based on transistors.
http://members.aol.com/deafcultureinfo/deaf_history1800s.htm
June 27, 2007 at 7:06 am
400 dollars to buy the electric hearing aid in 1898 and who bought it? I guess no one buys it because it is too expensive to buy one in 1898.