Mechanical Engineering

The History Of Headphones

Headphones is a crucial part of our society today and has been around for quite some time

By: Tan Thinh Nguyen, Journalist

March 10, 2025

Mr. Audio Feedback

Headphones are a very important part of our society today as they specialize in listening privately , noise cancellation, and even phone calls. And they have been around for a long time. We’ll be seeing how it was designed, how it was used, and how much it came to revolutionize over these past years to modern day.

These headphones were manufactured and started in the 1880s as it was used by telephonists. It was used because well, people didn’t want to get to work that much to pick up the phone. So that was one of the core reasons they had an idea to invent this. But quickly afterwards there came another design of headphones. It was invented in Britain and authorized users and customers to dial in a switchboard. All the while being able to be attached to concerts covering London. Next there came another but interesting representation of headphones that is made by Nathaniel Baldwin that is actually very close to our modern day headphones. The Navy brought 100 headphones but didn’t know that Nathaniel was making them by-hand. However, there came another pair of headphones which was used for music instead of transmissions, which was created by John Koss in 1958. In spite of that a better and new pair of headphones was created by Sony in 1979 which made it portable and played with a cassette player. In 2001, iPod created these very modern headphones which made music to the mainstream and tons of people brought it.

Now we bring our attention to modern day headphones which is one of the companies which is LSTN. They made them more colorful and bigger but very price tags. This shows how something simple and an idea like headphones which were used for radio communication could turn into something made for personal use like music. This exhibit some things can revolutionize over years to become better.