1928 Cell Phone User
In October 2010, Northern Irish filmmaker George Clarke uploaded a video clip entitled "Chaplin's Time Traveler" to YouTube. The clip analyzes bonus material in a DVD of the Charlie Chaplin film The Circus. Included in the DVD is footage from the film's Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in 1928. At one point, a woman is seen walking by, holding up an object to her ear. Clarke said that, on closer examination, she was talking into a thin, black device that had appeared to be a "phone." Clarke concluded that the woman was possibly a time traveler. The clip received millions of hits and was the subject of televised news stories.
Nicholas Jackson, associate editor for The Atlantic, says the most likely answer is that she's using a portable new hearing aid, technology that was just being developed at the time. Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University in St. Louis, thought that the woman might have been holding a rectangular-shaped ear trumpet. New York Daily News writer Michael Sheridan said the device was probably an early hearing aid, perhaps manufactured by Acousticon.
Read more about this topic: Andrew Carlssin
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