It’s hard to imagine what Count Alessandro Volta was thinking in the late 1700s when he inserted two metal rods into his ears and flipped on the electricity. But he certainly didn’t know that the “crackling and popping sounds” he heard would later help to cure the deaf and hard of hearing – it was just a wild supposition.
“I received a shock in the head and some moments after… I began to hear a sound… It was a kind of crackling with shocks as if some paste or tenacious matter had been boiling.”
The cochlear implant (or “bionic ear”) that later evolved from these experiments – and from the earlier investigations of Giuseppe Veratti and Benjamin Wilson – has already empowered over 600,000 people around the globe to overcome their hearing challenges. And this is where science merges with the miraculous. Witnessing the reaction of ...
