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Before hearing aids, there were other methods used to help people with hearing loss to hear more clearly. A simple hand raised to the side of the ear to increase the gathering of sound has been with us since the beginning of time.
Much later was the ear trumpet, which was invented in the 17th century. This usually metal device has a smaller end that is held to the ear and a wider end for capturing sound to help amplify anything that the listener wanted to hear.
In the 18th century, the collapsible ear trumpet was invented. They were first commercially produced in the early 19th century by a man named Frederick C. Rein, in London.
The invention of the first electric hearing aid was made possible by the arrival of the telephone in 1876. The technology used in the telephone could be applied to hearing aids, although the first electric hearing aid wasn't invented until more than 20 years after Alexander Graham Bell's telephone by Miller Reese Hutchison. Hutchison's 1898 design for a hearing aid that amplified weak sound signals used an electric current.
It was only 15 years later, in 1913, when commercially produced hearing aids were finally available. However, they weren't like the small devices that we have today and weren't really designed for wearing daily or even carrying around.
Another advancement came in the 1920s when vacuum tube hearing aids were created to turn speech into electrical signals and amplify them.
After World War II, many other types of technology were also used in the process of shrinking hearing aids that finally started to become smaller. With the invention of the transistor in 1948, vacuum tubes could be replaced. They also required less battery power and they had lower levels of distortion.
Further advancements were made in the next few decades, including the invention of the microprocessor and multi-channel amplitude compression, which is the shaping of sound -- in the 1970s high-speed processors; and microcomputers arrived in the 1980s. Hearing aids have been evolving rapidly as technology has advanced in the last few decades. In the 1990s, the first completely digital hearing aid was introduced.
My title talks about volume control so I will limit my overview to how sound was and is turned up and then down in the evolution of hearing aids. The first hearing aids literally had no real volume control. As the science of harnessing electricity grew, scientists discovered more current into the amplifier would cause the sound to be louder and less current softer. For many decades volume was controlled by trimmer switches. These were tiny, flat set screws on the surface of the hearing aids that could be turned with a tiny jeweler's screwdriver.
Most people relied completely on their dispenser and obviously adjustments could not be made in real time experience as noise grew or withdrew from what patients were trying to hear.
Next came a raised dial on the hearing aid about one-eighth of an inch in diameter. To this day, aids with these controls have the dial turn towards your nose to turn it up and towards your back to turn it down.
In the 1990s and early 2000s digital technology and early wireless concepts found the ability of one hearing to control its mate on the other side of the head. The next major step forward was the wireless remote control, a small, handheld device, now the size of half a Mounds candy bar, that can be used to turn the volume up and down without even touching the hearing aids.
All that progress has brought us to a downloadable application or "app" for the cell phone. These apps are free and link by Bluetooth wireless technology to the hearing aids and can work generally from up to 30 feet away. During the COVID pandemic I was able to remotely adjust hearing aids by the patient laying their devices next to their cell phone at home as my office computer linked to them from literally anywhere in the world.
Hearing aid technology is leaping forward each year.
If you need more volume in your life to hear better, see a hearing professional sometime very soon.
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Jeffrey L. Bayliff is owner of Hear the Birds Hearing Aid Centers in Lock Haven and State College.