This blog was featured on our social media's "Museum Mystery Mondays" series.
This artifact is a part of our Zieman collection. Irving P. Zieman was a private collector that founded a pioneer log cabin museum on Huckleberry Mountain in Henderson County in the early 1900s. The Mountain Gateway Museum acquired the collection in 1966.
It’s a hearing aid! Well, a very old one; it's called an ear horn or trumpet. People have been trying to cope with hearing loss as early as the 13th century. They used hollowed-out cow and ram horns, and in the 17th century, French mathematician Jean Leurechon invented the ear trumpet, as seen in the sketches. Made of metal, these hearing aids would amplify sound much like cupping a hand behind your ear. However, they were rather bulky to carry around and not as effective as today's hearing aids. By the time electric hearing aids emerged in the early 1900s, ear trumpets were outdated.
