Dre of their day. Designed to be used by telephonists, they even boasted earbuds to block out external sounds. Electrophone image credit: britishtelephones. Mercardier image credit: Vintage Telephones of the World. Fundamentalist Mormon and engineer Nathaniel Baldwin invented the first pair of audio headphones on his kitchen table in His idea, initially dismissed by sceptical private investors, was picked up by the US Navy who ordered pairs and made him a rich man.
Money well spent? Not quite: he invested his fortune in supporting the Mormon polygamous movement and went bankrupt. Launched in , the DT remained in production in one form or another until Meanwhile, across the border in Vienna, AKG established in was busy inventing the thoroughly modern Ks. Neither pair made much of an impression but the original poster provided the template for all headphone ads since — the perfect balance of impressive-sounding tech specs and marketing mumbo-jumbo.
This allowed many people in a room to sit together while listening to different audio. Headphones for listening pleasure soon followed in the s after the company Electrophone used earpieces to deliver music from opera houses in London to paying subscribers. Neither device resembled the headphones of today. For one thing, they were not worn on the head. This was impractical due to the weight of early personal listening systems. The first headphones we would recognize as such were the invention of an American named Nathaniel Baldwin.
Two ear cups were connected by a headband in a design that headphones have maintained in basic form up to the present day. The sound was mono but decent. Like many ambitious inventors at that time, Baldwin sent a prototype of his headphones to the U.
Navy who already used similar, though clunkier and inferior systems, for radio communication. On top of these production limitations, the young engineer and inventor refused to patent his design, believing that the innovation involved was too small to warrant it.
The next big innovation in the history of headphones came from Germany. The DT 48 was such a leap into the future that it is still produced today, with slight retoolings and improved sound. The s heralded a new era of personal listening enjoyment thanks to several key developments: Rising incomes, the invention of stereo and the introduction of the LP. In , John C.
Several companies worked on similar devices for the next forty years. They included the German firm Beyerdynamic, which produced the first dynamic consumer headphones in An interesting development in the story of modern headphones was the fact that German pilots in WW2 may have been the first to experience stereophonic sound through headphones.
This system allowed headphone-wearing pilots to reach their destinations, and bombers to accurately drop payloads without visually seeing their targets. As a result, any deviation from the assigned course results in the most beautiful ping-pong stereophony.
Whenever Luftwaffe pilots reached their intended target, the two signals would merge and produce a continuous tone. A few years after the war, AKG produced its first pair of headphones, called Ks.
Built with design in mind, this model would prove to be incredibly popular and was enough to make the company shift focus from film equipment to audio gear. The next major leap came in , however, when inventor John Koss invented the first pair of true stereo headphones -- The Koss SP Early models consisted of mini-speakers covered in cardboard and sofa foam, but they had an immediate impact on the world. Originally meant to demonstrate the quality of his company's portable record player--which had a nifty private-listening switch--Koss' headphones proved to be incredibly popular, just as rock and roll took over the music industry.
In the s, Koss cross-branded their newest headphones with the Beatles, creating the Beatlephones, which were specifically marketed to a younger audience, and started a marketing trend geared toward the younger music-listening audience rather than older audiophiles.
Just prior to this, in the lates, a company called Stax debuted the world's first-ever pair of electrostatic headphones. Called SR-1 , they would go into production at the beginning of the s. By the end of the 60s, Koss had a number of competitors in the headphone market. Companies like Philips were starting to put out more affordable headphones , but it was the Sennheiser HD that ushered in the next major revolution in headphones.
Jettisoning the thick foam cup, the Sennheiser HD headphones using an open design, making them lighter and much less bulky. They were an instant hit, selling more than , units in , and their design became the default for headphones for more than a decade. Then the Sony Walkman happened. Released in , Sony's portable music player harnessed the same lightweight, open design as the HD, to create a highly-portable music experience that took the world by storm.
While the headphones that came with the Walkman were generally awful sounding, third-party headphone makers cashed-in on the blockbuster success of the Walkman--and later the CD-playing Discman--to fill the gap. The s saw the invention, well re-invention really, of the earbud. This decade also saw the emergence of the in-ear headphone.
While innovative, they would not really make much of an impact until the work of Steve Jobs. As Sony was launching a new music revolution with the Walkman in , Dr.
Amar Bose was inspired by the awful quality of the headphones given to passengers during air travel. So he developed a way to cancel outside noise.
They were all made for communication or warplanes. Koss talked with an audio engineer about this and they quickly rigged up a pair of makeshift prototype headphones.
The design was refined built from two vacuum-formed brown plastic cups containing three-inch speakers protected by a perforated, light plastic cover and foam ear pads. These were connected by a bent metal rod and the Koss SP-3 headphones were born. Music lovers embraced the stereophonic headphones due to their enhanced sound quality, which was made possible by the use of different signals in each ear that could closely approximate the sounds of a concert hall.
The design was well received when it debuted at a hi-fi trade show in Milwaukee in and was almost immediately copied by other manufacturers, standardizing the design of headphones around the world for years to come. An interesting footnote to this story is the suggestion from media theorist Friedrich Kittler that, while Koss may have created the first truly stereo headphones, the first people to actually experience stereophonic sound through headphones were the members of the German Luftwaffe during World War II.
In his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , Kittler describes the innovative radar system used by the German Airforce during World War II, which allowed headphone-wearing pilots to reach the destinations and bombers to accurately drop payload without visually seeing their targets:. As a result, any deviation from the assigned course results in the most beautiful ping-pong stereophony.
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