Practical Aids for the Deaf

1916

Almost any pains are worth taking if by their means the senses of sight and hearing may be preserved; but sometimes, in spite of all that can be done, deafness goes on to the chronic form. In that case no treatment has been discovered that will cure it, especially if it is the kind that is associated with atrophy of the internal parts of the ear. It is of course true that atrophy, or wasting, of any part of the body means loss of function. If you had an atrophied hand or foot, you could see for yourself that it was useless. But the internal ear is hidden from us, and so some of us go on hoping against hope that a miracle will he worked in our own case and that some doctor somewhere will be able to raise the dead.

In that way a great deal of time is lost and a great deal of suffering caused. Chronic and incurable deafness is a cross that must be embraced if we would not be crushed beneath it. The first thing to do is to accept the inevitable with all the cheerfulness we can command; the next thing is to put away every bit of foolish, self-consciousness and false shame about the affection, and the third thing is to get as quickly as possible one of the many excellent contrivances that have been invented to help deaf people. In all our large cities, at the shops of the best opticians, you can find cases filled with these contrivances. The rules about permitting people to take them out on trial are usually very fair. Ten days' use of any one of these will show you whether it will help you or not.

A very useful form of appliance is the electrical apparatus in connection with its own battery. It is a bother, no doubt, to carry it about and manipulate it, but not hearing at all is a greater bother. That is undoubtedly the strongest crutch for the deaf; and its makers assert that it helps to train the ear back to the recognition of human speech. For partial deafness there are smaller and simpler devices, and for those who have accepted deafness as a fact beyond any curative measures, and who still have their own teeth for bone conduction of sound, the audiphone (sometimes called the dentiphone), a black gutta-percha fan held between the front teeth, is often the greatest help. It also possesses the advantage of costing only a few dollars.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 26, 1916, p. 4.

Sea Lions Helped to Detect U-Boats

1919

Design of Hydrophone Was Changed to Resemble Head of Acute Water Animal.

In the late months of the war some wild stories were published to the effect that the British naval authorities were training sea lions to catch German submarines. Of course this was ridiculous, but the story was based upon a fact, and that fact has only just been revealed.

It was at the recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, when Sir Charles Parsons, the president, delivered an address on "Science in War and Peace." In it he described the development of the binaural hydroplane, with which submarines are located by the sound they make. Early in the game it was discovered that the first forms of these instruments were useless when the vessel bearing them was in motion or when the sea was rough, because the noises made by the vessel's motion and by the waves drowned the noise of the submarine. This is where the sea lions came in.

Hear at Six Knots an Hour.

Sir Richard Paget, the eminent biologist, made experiments to learn how far these interesting animals could hear under water and at what speed their directional hearing ceased. These proved that the directional hearing of the lions was good up to six knots an hour.

Dr. Arthur Keith informed the naval experimenters that whales' ears are too small to receive sound waves in the usual way, but that the animals heard under water by the transmission of sound waves thru the bones of the head.

Design Was Changed.

Now, the whale's organ of hearing resembles the hydrophone. So the design of this was changed, and those used in the last year of the war were hollow bodies in the form of fish or porpoises, made of celluloid, varnished canvas or thin metal, filled with water and towed by the ship. The hydrophone was fixed in the head, and the towing cable carried the insulated wire leads to the telephone receivers of the observer on board the vessel.

These were towed some distance behind the ship, thus losing most of the noises made by the swift motion of this, and it was found that they registered directional sounds when traveling thru the water at speeds of fourteen knots and at considerable distances.

—The Saturday Blade, Chicago, Jan. 3, 1920, p. 9.

Hearing for the Deaf on Pike's Peak

Editorial briefs, Sept. 1910

A deaf man who climbed Pike's Peak found he could hear at that altitude. But the difficulty of the cure practically lies in the fact that it takes up his residence where he can hear there will be nobody for him to listen to.

Tarred, feathered and bitten is the New Jersey variation according to that story of the victim wbo was left thus scantily attired as the prey of the mosquitoes.

When a young married couple go away by aeroplane on their honeymoon their destination is sufficiently uncertain to fulfill all the requirements.

Perhaps the same fellows who are searching for germs in ice cream this summer will be hunting for them in our buckwheat cakes next winter.

If they insist on confiscating ice cream cones the small boy and some big ones, too, will be robbed of one of their most palatable enjoyments.

Will the insurance companies demand increased premiums from those who love to see the airships go round?

Owls Well Equipped by Nature

1919

Simple Explanation of Remarkable Sense of Hearing Possessed by the Owl

It Is held by naturalists that in order to capture its prey the owl must depend even more upon its sense of hearing than upon its sense of sight. The tufts of feathers that distinguish the short-eared and the long-eared owls are, of course, no more ears than they are horns. The true ear of the owl is a most remarkable organ.

The facial disk of feathers that gives the owl its characteristic appearance serves as a kind of sounding-board or ear-trumpet to concentrate the slightest sounds and to transmit them to the orifice of the true ear, concealed in the small feathers behind the eye. Even in the barn owl, which possesses the least complicated arrangement of this kind, the orifice of the ear is covered by a remarkable flap of the skin, while in the other species there are striking differences in the size and shape of this orifice and its covering flap on the two sides of the head.

The exact way in which owls utilize this elaborately specialized apparatus has still to be discovered.