This Is the First-Ever Pair of Headphones
We all pretty much know the stories behind the invention of the gramophone and the radio, but what about the guy that let you listen to both while your baby cried itself to sleep?
To be honest, going into this, I expected to discover that what we now consider headphones were a sort of amalgamation of multiple inventions — some mix of two speakers a misanthropic leatherworker strapped to either side of his head and a stone cone of sorts that a caveman once held up to his ear. But nope, a single man named Nathaniel Baldwin built them from scratch in 1910. And they had almost everything you’d expect right from the start: a headband, two earcups featuring one speaker each, no need for outside support.
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No Bluetooth, of course, but what are you gonna do?
One interesting twist is that the path that led Baldwin to invent the headphone didn’t involve music at all. He was just a humble Mormon, frustrated at how hard it was to hear his weekly sermons. The reproduced word of God wasn’t reaching his ears with enough oomph, so he changed the audio industry forever.
As for his actual manufacturing chops, it’s kind of insane how close to modern headphones his first stab was — it’s the kind of thing that makes the conspiracy part of my brain consider a time traveler forgetting his Sennheisers as part of this story.
If there are no wormholes involved, the thing to remember here is, the next time you toss on headphones for a train ride, thank the person responsible for them: the Mormon God.
