Chaplin’s Time Traveler Was Just Hard of Hearing

eartrumpet

[via Filmdrunk]

Well that solves that mystery. A few days ago I posted a clip of a man named George Clarke speculating as to what a certain lady (or is it a man?) in a Charlie  Chaplin movie was doing that so closely resembled talking on a cellular phone. George claimed to have studied the clip for over a year and shown it to hundreds of people, none of whom could figure out what the lady was doing. Well, leave it to the internet to provide the solution! No sooner did the clip go viral than LiveScience chimed in with a possible (and quite probable) answer!

What filmmaker George Clarke didn’t consider was that a simple ear trumpet could still explain it all, said hearing device historians.
“As you can tell from these pictures, old-fashioned mechanical or resonating hearing aids were not necessarily long and rounded,” said Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University in St. Louis.
“Short, compact rectangular forms were not unusual.” In other words, they could look something like a cell phone to imaginative YouTube viewers in the 21st century.

And there you have it! Makes perfect sense to me! Just goes to show you that if you have a mystery to solve, the internet can do it for you, and right quickly at that!

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