Sybil Bruncheon's "WONDERFUL WORLD of TOMORROW!"..... Wonder #71 :
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Hello Friends! (...and I use that term loosely!) Did you know that scientists and engineers are working around the clock to improve YOUR lives in the future?.... and yet so many people don’t realize that wonderful breakthroughs in modern convenience and technology have actually been thought of much earlier by wiser heads than their own! Did you know that the concept of listening to your own music on personal headphones was actually invented by a Miss Katrina Guss of Crockers Corners, Colorado in 1902? At sixteen she had been the only female member of her high school science club, and had won the regional championship blue ribbon for the 4H Science Fair in Windsor, Wyoming for her “WHY NOT EAT BUGS?” anti-starvation project.
The idea for headphones came to her one evening when her mother and father (who were both extremely hard-of-hearing) were each listening to the gramophone and talking on the telephone. Katrina was in the kitchen working on her idea for bullet-proof pie tins to be used by chefs on the front-lines in battle, perhaps during bake-offs or cake sales. The racket of yelling parents and blaring music was too much for Katrina, and she covered her tormented ears with a pair of cake pans as she began humming “Nearer My God To Thee”… She claimed the inspiration was like a bolt of lightning! She began sketching her ideas and experimenting in her garage using her father’s power tools and her mother’s cooking utensils…
Sadly, her big breakthrough came the same week that the marching band at her old high school was involved in a catastrophic bus crash. The entire percussion section of the band was killed, and the school board divested itself of most of the instruments. Katrina went to the auction and picked up several of the more esoteric instruments including a floogle-horn, a piccolo, a triangle, a glockenspiel, a tenor persnikken, two shpettels (one in brass and the other in nickle-silver), and a pair of tambourines. Struggling with her limited knowledge of acoustical science and sparse supplies of copper wiring, plumber’s epoxy, and 13 paperclips, she finally created her first set of personal headphones. The good news was that a person could now block out all the loud and vexing noise of the modern world and listen to their own soothing music. The bad news?..... the head phones only played “tambourine”…
[Tragically, only two years later, Katrina Guss was killed in a sudden and appalling accident in her laboratory when she finished a new set of headphones for the piccolo. She had finished the head gear and the ear-pieces, but when she flipped the electrical switch, the piccolo was driven into her left ear and blew her brains out… apparently she was about to listen to John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever”. On a happier note, she was awarded a posthumous patriotism ribbon and medal by the local Veterans of Foreign Wars Lodge…the one over on the corner of Chester Arthur Boulevard, and Grover Cleveland Avenue.]
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