The first patent for audio speaker type technology was registered in the year 1925 by Edward W. Kellogg and Chester W. Rice. This type of technology has a scientific name – the electroacoustic transducer. This device is capable of converting an electrical signal into a corresponding sound. The principle that makes the audio speaker function is very similar to that of the microphone. Where the microphone uses an electrical signal to convert sound into input, the speaker reverses this principle and uses that same electrical signal to output the sound.
There are several methods that exist for converting electrical signals into sound, but the most common one utilizes an alternating current electrical audio signal applied to it’s voice coil, which is a coil of wire suspended in a circular gap between the poles of a permanent magnet, where the coil is forced to move back and forth due to Faraday’s law of induction, which causes a conically shaped diaphragm attached to the coil to move back and forth, pushing the air to create sound waves.
The first audio speaker devices began as horns, developed in the 1880’s through the 1920’s by Thomas Edison, Magnavox and Victrola but did not use any electrical amplification technology and therefore the sound that came out of them was insufficiently powerful for a large stadium of people to be able to hear. These were large, ugly, cumbersome machines that are still a novelty collection item to this day.
The electromagnetic part of the loudspeaker was actually invented in the 1860’s, but since the science and engineering of acoustics and the materials needed to combine electricity, radio, sound waves, mechanics, chemistry and physics in order to make sound waves come out of an electrical machine were not yet well developed enough, it took some 40 years for the technology and know how to become available for this invention to finally come to fruition in it’s official form as we know it today.
The first electromagnetic loudspeaker was developed by Johann Phillip Reis in the year 1861 in Freidrichsdorf, Germany. Eventually it would be Alexander Graham Bell that would attempt to replicate the speaker made by Reis in 1876 but the attempt was unsuccessful due to the gaps in knowledge in the aforementioned sciences and fields of study in the last paragraph.
Fast forward to modern times and speakers began to be made smaller and smaller until they were able to fit inside a device you could put right up to your ear, that was portable, compact and could be carried in your pocket. These are called headphones. Headphones themselves as a concept have actually existed since 1890’s, in Britain, called an electrophone. In the 1920’s a pair of headphones closely resembling modern headphones came into fruition, called Brandes radio headphones.
This miniaturization of sound wave projection technology has changed the way we live. In 2005 a new concept came out, which was a staple of industrial design for it’s time. They were called the Boomtune Mini, a triple A battery operated tripod style headphones that could be plugged into your cellular phone to emit sound. They were primarily meant for IPod’s as the wide rectangular audio jack resembles something you would plug into an early IPhone or IPod. The technology was essentially the size of a USB stick and could extend and retract to create a miniature portable speaker that you could place down on a surface and it would emit music from it. Truly a staple for progress, as many people in 2005 were just phasing out their old Sony Walkmans which existed since the 1980’s, where CD players with headphone capabilities you could carry around in your pocket that became popular in the 1990’s were suddenly disrupted by an advent of a version that used much greater storage capacity, without the need for a recorded medium like a CD to play music, called an MP3 player.
Now, we have wireless headphones that work through Bluetooth. Who knows what the future might hold next for audio based speaker technology? For now, the miniaturization of audio speaker technology has arrived.
