Little Girl Gets New Ear And Cochlear Implant

New tests were devised for implanted patients. One was congenitally deaf and had never heard sound. Pettit employed a music professor to synthesize simple tunes and sounds in various sound envelopes, and new pitch and loudness-scaling tests were devised. When one of the reimplanted patients was tested by the team under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, in 1972, a Moog synthesized version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" was presented to the patient through the cochlear implant. The camera caught the patient humming the melody and tapping a pencil to the tempo of the tune. That sequence convinced the department chairman to support the cochlear implant project. When the film was shown to a meeting of otologists later in 1972 it convinced the scientific community that meaningful sound could be conveyed to the brain by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve.
In 1976 a paper (received Feb 1975) was published by Pialoux, Chouard and McLeod that stated that, in the six months before the paper being submitted, seven patients were implanted with an eight-channel device. Although it was reported that about 50% of ordinary words were understood without lipreading, this has not been supported by audiological data in the literature.
In 1972 the House 3M single-electrode implant was the first to be commercially marketed. However, it was Dr. Michelson's patents and ultimately device which are thought of as the first cochlear implants.
Parallel to the developments in California, in the 1970s there were two other groups working on the development of the cochlear implant in Vienna, Austria and Melbourne, Australia. On December 16, 1977 professor Kurt Burian implanted a multichannel cochlear implant. The device was developed by the scientists Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair, who founded MED-EL, producer of hearing implants, in 1989.