History of Cochlear Implants

Since hearing with two ears allows people to localize sounds and to hear, cochlear implants nowadays can be considered one of the major medical advancements which resulted from many years of endless experiments and researches of scientists, doctors, and other researchers. The deaf people and the sensorineural hearing impaired people of the modern age are very lucky to have this kind of medical technology.

So how did the development of cochlear implants start? In 1790, Alessandro Volta, the electric battery developer, has discovered that our auditory system can be electrically stimulated to create a perception of sound. What he did to discover this stimulation was place metal rods in his own ears which are connected to a fifty-volt circuit. He had experienced a jolt and heard a noise like that of a boiling soup. This discovery started experiment frenzy from other researchers as well until they discovered how to develop sound amplifying electrical hearing aids in the 20th century.

It wasn’t until the 1950’s when the first direct stimulation of acoustic nerve with an electrode occurred. Andre Djourno and Charles Evries are the French-Algerian surgeons who performed this test by placing wires on the exposed nerves during a surgical procedure. When the wires were stimulated with current, the patient heard various sounds of a roulette wheel and a cricket.

This astounding medical finding of Djourno and Evries made an American doctor in 1961 named William F. House find ways of developing an implant device to achieve the same outcome. He first started having the device implanted into three of his patients. His technology only uses a single electrode and was designed to help users in lip-reading. This has made his deaf patients somehow hear. He created the first wearable implant in 1969.

In the 1970’s era, Graeme Clark began developing implants which created multiple point stimulation in the ear’s cochlea. He is a researcher in the University of Melbourne in Australia and his inspiration of developing cochlear implants is his deaf father. When at last Clark developed the multi-channel cochlear implant, Rod Saunders received the first most successful multi-channel cochlear implant on August 1, 1978.