The history
2,400 years from a Greek guess about the eardrum to cochlear implants, digital hearing aids and a global plan for hearing.
For a long time the ear was a puzzle hidden inside the hardest bone of the skull. Anatomists slowly found its tiny bones, its tubes and its fluid-filled snail. Physicists and engineers then worked out how it sorts sound by pitch and turns it into electricity, and used that knowledge to measure hearing, amplify it and even bypass damaged hair cells. Today hearing loss is one of the most common health problems on Earth, and much of it can be prevented.
1562–64
Post-classical account of the Eustachian tube
Bartolomeo Eustachi, Rome
1683
Book devoted to the ear
Joseph-Guichard Duverney, Paris
1800
Firm making hearing aids
F. C. Rein, London
1851
Description of the organ of Corti
Alfonso Corti
1922
Commercial electronic audiometer
Western Electric, USA
1952
Commercial product using a transistor (a hearing aid)
Sonotone, USA
1957
Implanted electrical stimulation of the hearing nerve
Djourno and Eyriès, Paris
1978
Multichannel cochlear implant in a person
Graeme Clark, Melbourne
1996
Commercially successful digital hearing aid
Widex Senso, Denmark
500 BCE – 1500
Doctors in Greece, India and Rome notice the eardrum, repair ears and trace a nerve of hearing, but the inside of the ear stays a mystery.
400 BCE
c. 400 BCE (attributed)
Greek doctors in the Hippocratic tradition are credited with first noting that the thin skin deep in the ear, the eardrum, has something to do with hearing. They had no idea yet what lay behind it.
Why it mattered. It is the first known link between a part of the ear and the sense of hearing.
300 BCE
c. 600 BCE – 300 CE (dating debated)
The Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Indian surgical text whose date scholars still debate, describes ways to rebuild torn earlobes using flaps of nearby skin. Stretched, heavy earrings often tore them.
Why it mattered. It shows skilled ear surgery in India long before anyone understood how hearing works.
170
2nd century CE
Galen described a nerve running from the hard, stony part of the skull into the brain and taught that it carried sound. He worked mostly from animal dissections and knew nothing of the tiny ear bones.
Why it mattered. For over a thousand years, doctors learned about hearing from his books.
1500 – 1700
Renaissance anatomists find the three tiny bones, the Eustachian tube, the cochlea and the labyrinth, and write the first book about the ear.
1543
In his great anatomy book, De humani corporis fabrica, Vesalius described two tiny bones in the middle ear. Their names, malleus (hammer) and incus (anvil), came from their shapes.
Why it mattered. It opened the middle ear to careful study, based on human dissection rather than old books.
1546
c. 1546 (published 1603)
The Sicilian anatomist Ingrassia is usually credited with first describing the third ear bone, the stapes or stirrup, in the 1540s, though his book was only printed after his death. At about 3 mm it is the smallest bone in the body.
Why it mattered. With it, the chain of three bones that carries sound across the middle ear was complete.
1561
In his Observationes anatomicae, Falloppio described the round and oval windows and the inner ear, and gave us the words cochlea (Latin for snail shell) and labyrinth for its twisting passages.
Why it mattered. The names are still used in every anatomy book and hospital today.
1562
1562 (printed 1564)
Eustachi's letter on the organ of hearing, dated 1562 and printed in 1564, gave the first detailed post-classical account of the tube joining the middle ear to the throat. It now carries his name: the Eustachian tube.
Why it mattered. It explained how air reaches the middle ear, and why your ears pop when you swallow on a plane.
1683
Duverney's Traité de l'organe de l'ouïe was the first whole book on the structure, workings and diseases of the ear. With the physicist Edme Mariotte he even guessed that different parts of the cochlea answer different pitches.
Why it mattered. It turned the study of the ear into a subject of its own, now called otology.
1630 – 1900
Ear trumpets gather sound for people losing their hearing, and shops start selling them.
1634
The Jesuit mathematician Jean Leurechon gave the earliest known description of an ear trumpet, a funnel held to the ear to gather more sound. Such trumpets were used for about three centuries.
Why it mattered. A funnel does what the pinna does, only bigger: it collects sound from a wider area.
1800
F. C. Rein started the first firm to make ear trumpets commercially, along with hearing fans and speaking tubes. In 1819 it built an acoustic throne for King John VI of Portugal, with hidden trumpets in the arms.
Why it mattered. Hearing help became something you could buy, not just a home-made horn.
1813
c. 1813
Maelzel, the inventor who popularised the metronome, made several ear trumpets for Beethoven as the composer lost his hearing. Some fitted round his head with a metal band. They are kept at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn.
Why it mattered. It is a famous reminder that hearing loss can happen to anyone, even the greatest musicians.
1850 – 1900
Microscopes reveal the organ of Corti, Helmholtz links pitch to place, and a teacher of the deaf invents the telephone.
1851
The Italian anatomist Alfonso Corti used a microscope to describe the strip of hair cells and supporting cells on the basilar membrane. His paper appeared in 1851, and the structure is still called the organ of Corti.
Why it mattered. It is where sound actually becomes a nerve signal.
1863
In On the Sensations of Tone, Helmholtz proposed that the cochlea holds a row of tuned resonators, like piano strings, each answering one pitch. He thought the fibres across the basilar membrane were the strings.
Why it mattered. His idea of a place for each pitch was right in spirit, and set the question Békésy answered.
1876
1872–1876
Bell taught deaf pupils in Boston, using his father's "visible speech" system, and opened his own school in 1872. His study of speech and sound led to the telephone, patented on 7 March 1876. Many Deaf people today criticise his push to teach speech in place of sign language.
Why it mattered. The unit of sound level, the bel and the decibel, is named after him.
1920 – 1995
Electronics measure hearing, name the decibel, amplify sound and even stimulate the nerve directly. The travelling wave and the cochlear amplifier are found.
1922
The Western Electric 1-A was the first commercial electronic audiometer. It played pure tones from 32 Hz to about 16 kHz at controlled levels, so a doctor could chart exactly how well each ear heard. The cheaper 2-A followed in 1923.
Why it mattered. Hearing tests became numbers on a chart, the audiogram, instead of guesses with a ticking watch.
1928
Telephone engineers needed a unit for how much a signal fades along a line. In 1928 their "transmission unit" was renamed the decibel, a tenth of a bel, in honour of Alexander Graham Bell.
Why it mattered. The same log scale now measures everything from a whisper to a jet engine.
1930
Wever and Bray wired up a cat's auditory nerve to a telephone receiver in another room and heard speech spoken into the cat's ear. Most of the signal later turned out to come from the hair cells themselves: the cochlear microphonic.
Why it mattered. It proved the inner ear turns sound into electrical signals that follow the sound wave.
1933
Fletcher and Munson measured how strong tones of different pitches must be to sound equally loud. Ears turned out to be far less sensitive to low and very high pitches than to the middle. Their curves became today's standard, ISO 226.
Why it mattered. It is why sound meters use weightings like dB(A), and why music sounds thin when played quietly.
1952
29 December 1952
The Sonotone 1010 hearing aid used one transistor along with two tiny vacuum tubes. Hearing aids had used vacuum tubes since the 1920s; the transistor made batteries last much longer. Soon all-transistor aids small enough to wear on the ear followed.
Why it mattered. Hearing aids were the first commercial product ever to use the transistor.
1957
25 February 1957
Djourno and Eyriès placed a coil and electrode on the auditory nerve of a deaf patient. With electrical pulses he could sense sounds and some rhythm of speech, though not understand words.
Why it mattered. It was the first implanted device to create hearing by electricity, the seed of the cochlear implant.
1961
Working with ears from cadavers and very fine instruments, Békésy watched waves run along the basilar membrane, each pitch peaking at its own place. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1961.
Why it mattered. He showed how the cochlea sorts sound by pitch, the idea behind the cochlea chapter.
1978
Kemp placed a tiny microphone in the ear canal and found that the cochlea sends out faint echoes of sounds played into it. These otoacoustic emissions come from the outer hair cells.
Why it mattered. The discovery led to quick, painless hearing screening for newborn babies.
1978
1 August 1978
Clark's team implanted a multichannel device in Rod Saunders, who was totally deaf. Its electrodes, spread along the cochlea, used the place map to send different pitches to different nerve fibres. As the Nucleus implant it was approved by the US FDA for adults in 1985.
Why it mattered. Hundreds of thousands of people, including children born deaf, now hear with cochlear implants.
1985
Brownell's team found that outer hair cells, taken out of the ear, get shorter and longer when their voltage changes. This electromotility is the engine of the cochlear amplifier.
Why it mattered. It explained how the ear boosts quiet sounds, and why Kemp heard echoes coming out.
1988
Two teams showed that young birds regrow hair cells after damage from loud noise, and later work found their hearing largely comes back. Humans and other mammals cannot do this.
Why it mattered. It started the search for ways to help human hair cells grow back, still unsolved.
1960 – today
Digital hearing aids, national programmes in countries such as India, safe-listening standards and the WHO's first report on hearing.
1965
AIISH began in 1965 as the Institute of Logopedics on the Manasagangotri campus in Mysuru. It trains audiologists and speech therapists and runs hearing clinics and research, under India's health ministry.
Why it mattered. It built much of India's audiology profession.
1996
Widex launched the Senso, the first commercially successful fully digital hearing aid, and Oticon's DigiFocus followed almost at once. A tiny computer could now shape the sound for each ear and cut background noise.
Why it mattered. Almost every hearing aid sold today is digital.
2007
2006–07 (from January 2007)
The National Programme for Prevention and Control of Deafness began as a pilot in 25 districts of 10 states and one union territory. It aims to find and treat ear problems early and has since spread to hundreds of districts.
Why it mattered. It brought ear and hearing care into India's public health system.
2019
February 2019
The WHO and the International Telecommunication Union set out how phones and music players should track your weekly sound dose, with a reference of 80 dB for 40 hours a week for adults, and warn you before it runs out.
Why it mattered. It turns the science of noise damage into a feature in your pocket.
2021
3 March 2021
The WHO reported that about 1.5 billion people live with some hearing loss, and that nearly 2.5 billion may by 2050, unless more is done. Much of it could be prevented, for example by safe listening and treating ear infections.
Why it mattered. It made hearing a global health priority, not a private problem.
By the numbers
Global Burden of Disease estimates: about one person in five had some hearing loss in 2019. As the world grows older, the number is projected to rise by more than half by 2050.
Did you know?
The stapes, about 3 mm long, is the smallest bone in the human body.
Each ear has only about 15,500 hair cells, and in humans they never grow back.
Your cochlea makes faint sounds of its own, which is how newborn babies’ hearing is screened.
Hearing aids were the first product ever sold with a transistor inside, in 1952.
Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony when he was almost completely deaf.
The people
c. 1510 – 1574 · Anatomist · Italy
Described the tube from the middle ear to the throat that bears his name.
1523 – 1562 · Anatomist · Italy
Named the cochlea and the labyrinth and described the ear’s two windows.
1822 – 1876 · Anatomist · Italy
First described the hair-cell organ where sound becomes a nerve signal.
1821 – 1894 · Physicist and physiologist · Germany
Proposed that each place in the cochlea answers its own pitch.
1847 – 1922 · Teacher of the deaf and inventor · Scotland, worked in the USA and Canada
Invented the telephone; the bel and decibel are named after him.
1884 – 1981 · Physicist · USA
Measured how loud tones of every pitch sound, with Wilden Munson.
1899 – 1972 · Biophysicist · Hungary, worked in the USA
Saw the travelling wave in the cochlea and won the 1961 Nobel Prize.
born 1935 · Ear surgeon · Australia
Led the team behind the multichannel cochlear implant.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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