Tucked away in museum and university collections are some wonderfully unusual objects: metal horns, painted headbands, fans with small trumpets attached, even a royal throne with hollow armrests. They are all part of the history of hearing aids, and the humble ear trumpet sits near the start of the story. This article is a heritage and general-interest look at how hearing devices changed over roughly four centuries, drawing on museum and university archives. It is a history piece, not a guide to any modern device.
What Was the First Hearing Aid?
It depends on how you define one. The hearing device timeline compiled by the Bernard Becker Medical Library at Washington University School of Medicine records that in 1588 the Italian scholar Giovanni Battista Porta described early hearing aids made of wood and shaped like the ears of animals known for sharp hearing. By 1657, a German professor of medicine was writing about ear trumpets in use in Spain. The first electric hearing device arrived much later, at the very end of the 1800s, and that part of the story comes a little further down.
The Age of the Ear Trumpet
Before electricity, hearing devices had to work with sound alone. The Becker Library explains that ear trumpets were one of the main types of hearing device available before electrical amplification, using mechanical means to collect more sound waves than the ear by itself and channel them into the ear canal.
By the late 1700s, according to the same timeline, funnel or cone-shaped ear trumpets were common, often in collapsible versions. Some models even carried the names of the people they were designed for, such as the Reynolds Trumpet, made for the British portrait painter Joshua Reynolds.
A few names from this era still turn up in museum catalogues:
- F.C. Rein and Son: established in London in 1800, it is the earliest firm known to have made hearing aids on a commercial basis. Its range included ear trumpets, acoustic urns and speaking tubes for churches, and the business kept going until 1963.
- Johann Nepomuk Maelzel: famous as the inventor of the metronome, he began making ear trumpets in 1808 and made several for the composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Fans, Headbands and a Throne
Why did so many old hearing devices look like something else? The Becker Library's "Deafness in Disguise" exhibit suggests that public reaction, or the reaction people expected from others, encouraged a trend towards devices that could be hidden in everyday items or worn discreetly.
The results were inventive. Acoustic headbands, which the exhibit describes as the earliest known concealed design, were made to blend into a hairstyle or hat. One floral headband made by F.C. Rein around 1802 still shows its original white and green paint. Acoustic fans were popular with women in the 19th century, and some had small trumpets attached. Other fans worked by bone conduction: the Becker Library describes a fan held against the teeth so that sound travelled through the bones of the head.
The grandest example is surely the acoustic throne F.C. Rein made in 1819 for King John of Portugal. Its hollow armrests, carved as lions' heads, fed into a resonant box in the seat, with a hearing tube running from there to the king.
When Did Hearing Aids Become Electric?
Electric hearing aids grew out of telephone technology in the late 1800s. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone arrived in 1876, and the carbon transmitter developed in 1878 gave it a way to be adapted into a hearing device, according to the Becker timeline.
The first United States patent for an electric hearing aid was issued in 1892, although that device was never produced. Around 1898 to 1899, Miller Reese Hutchison invented what may be the first electric hearing device, a table model called the Akoulallion, followed in 1900 by a smaller version sold as the Akouphone.
These early electric aids paired a carbon microphone with a battery. The Becker Library notes that carbon hearing aids had limited amplification and only modest sound quality, and that a typical model from the late 1920s was large, hard to carry and sensitive to heat and cold.
The vacuum tube came next. In 1920, Earl C. Hansen patented the first vacuum tube hearing aid, an instrument larger than a box camera. Smaller vacuum tubes produced in England from the mid-1930s made the first wearable vacuum tube hearing aids possible.
How the Transistor Shrank Hearing Aids
The transistor was invented at Bell Telephone Laboratories in December 1947, and the Becker timeline notes that a refined version, the junction transistor, found its first commercial use in hearing aids. The first all-transistor hearing aid was introduced in January 1953. The timeline quotes industry figures showing how quickly things changed: of the 335,000 hearing aids sold in the United States in 1954, 325,000 were all-transistor models.
Smaller parts made new styles practical, including behind-the-ear models and hearing aids built into the arms of spectacles. By 1959, spectacle hearing aids made up about half of United States hearing aid sales. The first behind-the-ear aid using an integrated circuit followed in 1964, and later developments such as smaller microphones in 1971 and zinc-air batteries in 1977 helped in-the-ear styles grow.
The Digital Era
Digital technology arrived in stages. The Becker timeline records experimental wearable digital hearing aids in the 1980s, then the first fully digital hearing aid to be successfully sold commercially in 1996. From that point the story moves into the devices of today, which sit at the end of a very long line of engineering.
Some of the ideas in modern devices have their own histories worth exploring, and we have looked at a few of them separately, including the role of the telecoil, how artificial intelligence is used in modern devices, and the difference between hearing amplifiers and hearing aids.
An Australian Chapter
Australia has a place in this story too. According to the National Acoustic Laboratories (NAL), it was established in 1947 as the Commonwealth Acoustic Laboratories to carry out research and deliver hearing services to children and war veterans. The name changed to the National Acoustic Laboratories in 1973. In 1992 the organisation became Australian Hearing Services, now known as Hearing Australia, while the research division kept the NAL name. For many older residents of Rockhampton and Central Queensland, that makes the national hearing research story one that has unfolded within their own lifetimes.
Why Ear Trumpets Still Fascinate
There is something about an old ear trumpet that makes people stop and look. Perhaps it is the craftsmanship, or the reminder of how much thought and ingenuity people have poured into listening devices over the centuries. From painted headbands to pocket-sized electronics, the history of hearing aids is a story of steady invention, and it is one worth a second look next time a brass horn turns up in a museum case or a grandparent's cupboard.
If you'd like to chat about your hearing, the friendly team at CQ Audiology in Rockhampton is here to help. Call (07) 4848 6528 or book online.
Sources: Bernard Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine (timeline of hearing devices, concealed hearing devices of the 19th and 20th centuries); National Acoustic Laboratories (history of NAL and Hearing Australia).
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