Happy New Year or New Ear! – A Clever Invention

Mr. Ernest Rose, of Green Street, Ryde, has just taken out a patent for an appliance for enabling the deaf to hear. Mr. Rose is himself very deaf and the difficulty, or rather, the impossibility of finding something that would enable him to hear satisfactorily induced him to make experiments on his own account.

The result is the extremely efficient instrument which he has shown us. It consists of a small cone shaped trumpet about seven inches in length, to which is attached a long but light flexible tube and small ear piece. The cone has a silver rim at the wider end, and is very light and nice in appearance. Mr. Rose discovered that if the rim of the cone was allowed to touch the chin while a person was speaking the vibration assisted in some way to carry the voice through the tube to the deaf person’s ear. Whatever the scientific explanation may be, it is a fact that if a person holds the cone lightly against his or her chin, and speaks in an ordinary, or even subdued voice, across the mouth of the cone, a person whose hearing is not entirely destroyed can hear quite distinctly.

Mr. Rose is now taking steps to get his invention placed properly on the market, and his fellow townsmen will join in the hope that his patience and ingenuity will meet with that financial return which is not always the fruit of the inventor’s genius.

Source: Isle of Wight Observer 14 March 1908

Picture source: Wikimedia commons – wellcomeimages, Wellcome Collection Gallery