Hugh Hetherington Hearing Aid Museum
Hugh Hetherington Hearing Aid Museum

The Hearing Aid Museum

Hearing Aids of all types—Ear Trumpets, Carbon Hearing Aids, Vacuum Tube Hearing Aids, Transistor Hearing Aids, Body Hearing Aids, Eyeglass Hearing Aids and much more!

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About The Hearing Aid Museum

The Hearing Aid Museum

The Hearing Aid Museum is the largest on-line hearing aid museum in the world, and probably the second-largest hearing aid collection in the world (the Kent State University hearing aid collection is the largest). The museum collection consists of about 1,500 hearing aids and related items.

The concept of this museum was to put pictures and accompanying details of old hearing aids on-line so anyone, anywhere with Internet access could learn about these old items without having to travel to a specific physical location.

The Museum was the brainchild of Neil Bauman, Ph.D., the CEO of the Center for Hearing Loss Help. He took over and greatly added to the collection of Hugh Hetherington, the original collector of this valuable historical resource.

Neil Bauman

Dr. Neil was born with a severe hearing loss and has worn hearing aids since 1955. He started out wearing one of the first transistorized hearing aids and has progressed though to the latest digital technology over the past 60 plus years.

Dr. Neil got interested in old hearing aids after seeing Hugh's collection back in 2002. After 4 years of preparation, the Hearing Aid Museum website went public in 2006.

Dr. Neil is the CEO of the Center for Hearing Loss Help. The Center helps people all over the world effectively cope with their hearing losses. He is the author of 11 books related to hearing loss (many now have gone through several editions). He has also written more than 1,000 articles related to hearing loss.

Hugh Hetherington

Hugh Hetherington is a retired telephone engineer whose interest in early hearing aids began in the 1950's. As an employee of a telephone installation company he purchased a second hand 1950s vacuum tube hearing aid in order to adapt it as a cable tracer for use in telephone offices by adding a magnetic pickup to the unit. This magnetic pickup which is now common in most hearing aids today is called a telecoil.

Ironically, Hugh now has a high frequency hearing loss which developed while he was working in the noisy step-by-step telephone offices in the 1950s and 1960s.

Hugh is a director of the North Shore Branch (North Vancouver, B.C.) of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (CHHA). During his retirement, he has worked extensively with the CHHA to develop programs for the North Shore Branch. He is the editor of their newsletter Mountain Ear and often lectures on hearing loss issues, including the history of hearing aids.

 



The Hearing Aid Museum

is sponsored by

The Center for Hearing Loss Help

"where you will receive the information, support and counsel you need in order to live an exciting and fulfilling life in spite of your hearing loss"