the.com/headphone
a privacy booth for your skull, smuggling whole worlds past everyone within arm's reach
means a pair of small speakers held over or in your ears so you can listen to audio without anyone else hearing it.
from A plain English compound of "head" and "phone" — the latter clipped from "telephone," itself built from Greek "phone," meaning voice or sound. The earliest headphones grew out of telephone and radio operators' single earpieces around the turn of the 20th century, when listeners strapped the things to their heads to keep both hands free; the name simply describes what it is — a phone (sound-maker) you wear on your head.
- first model
- Nathaniel Baldwin built them on his kitchen table in 1910
- navy buyer
- early adopters were U.S. Navy radio operators
- noise canceling
- invented for pilots, born from an airplane idea in 1978
- left and right
- stereo sound only became standard in the 1950s
- hidden danger
- sustained loud listening can permanently kill inner-ear hair cells
beats by dre — apple subsidiary founded 2008, sold for $3 billion in 2014
sony wh-1000xm5 — best-selling noise-canceling headphones with over 2 million units sold annually
apple airpods pro — released 2019, generated $12 billion in revenue for apple in 2021