Past Forward: Electric Hearing

Rod Saunders lost his hearing in a car accident 1976. Nearly two years later, Graeme Clark, an Australian ear, nose, and throat surgeon, Brian Pyman, surgeon assisting him, inserted into Saunders’s auditory canal prototype of multichannel cochlear implant. The implant was designed to wirelessly connect external microphone speech-processing unit. Several weeks came back the hospital determine if implant’s electrical stimulation nerve could replicate sound that he hear. It didn’t work. A few days it still Third time charm: After engineers fixed loose connection unit, heard rhythm sang along recording “Waltzing Matilda.” By December able distinguish speech using signals alone. Today hundreds thousands people rely on implants Even so, technology remains controversial within Deaf community.