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| Brown Bag Lecture: Mara Mills, "Hearing Aids and Miniaturization, 1880-1954”
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| Date: |
28 April 2009 |
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| Time: |
12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. |
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| Location: |
Chemical Heritage Foundation
6th Floor Conference Room
315 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106 |
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| Free and open to the public.
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| Description:
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Subminiature vacuum tubes originated in the hearing-aid industry; the button battery, the transistor, and the integrated circuit made their first commercial appearances there. Yet power, portability, and invisibility were central concerns for hearing-aid users before electronics. This talk will survey the long history of miniaturization, focusing on the roles deaf and hard-of-hearing people played in component engineering as early adopters, inventors, retailers, and manufacturers.
Mara Mills is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds a master’s degree in biology and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University. Mills is working on a manuscript about deafness, telephone engineering, and the emergence of information theory and cybernetics.
Learn more about CHF's Brown Bag Lecture series.
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