Who Made That Earbud?

By: Jens Mortensen for The New York Times        

In “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury described a futuristic radio that could be worn inside the ear. It would be “a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest,” he wrote, and the conduit for “an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk, coming in on the shore of [your] unsleeping mind.” That was more than 50 years ago, but it’s not a bad description of iPod headphones.

In-ear listening devices had been around for at least a century. Starting in the early 1850s, doctors inserted the ivory tips of stethoscopes into each ear, and a few decades later, similar “ear tubes” were used to listen to recorded music. Thomas Edison attached stethoscopelike headphones to his phonograph machine, which played sound off wax cylinders. Some machines came with multiple sets of tubes, dangling like streamers on a jellyfish, so that several people could listen at once.

Early earphones came in two varieties, says Jean-Paul Agnard, proprietor of the Edison Phonograph Museum in Quebec. Some were made to cover the ear; others were placed in the ear canal. Around the same time, inventors tried in-ear adjuncts to the telephone. In 1891, a Parisian named Ernest Mercadier patented what he called the “bi-telephone” — a pair of tips wrapped in rubber that would “close the ear to external sounds.”More advanced designs arrived for use with hearing aids in the first half of the 20th century. But the major burst of earphone innovation did not occur until the 1980s, when the Sony Walkman was introduced. Consumers wanted sleeker, less obtrusive headphones for their portable devices. Manufacturers also started making lighter headsets for telemarketing, an industry that grew by 800 percent from 1985 to 1995.

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The earbuds of that era didn’t always sit so firmly in place, and at times they were too tight. Some makers started sheathing them with plastic foam. Others sold kits for taking individualized impressions of a person’s ear canals. Customers would make the molds at home, then mail them in to get a pair of customized probes.

But earbuds didn’t hit their market peak until after 2001, when Apple started selling them for use with MP3 players. The white iPod headphones, designed by Jonathan Ive, would become a status symbol for early adopters, and then a key part of Apple’s marketing campaign. In 2012, the company redesigned its earbuds, and branded them as “EarPods.” The new devices resemble tiny hair dryers with protruding ends. (Previous models looked flatter, like white M&M’s.) They are supposed to be more comfortable than other earbud-style headphones, but reviewers haven’t been that enthusiastic so far. “The key thing about Apple’s EarPods,” wrote the tech site Engadget, “is that they’re tolerable to use.”