The hottest news of yesterday, the Charlie Chaplin time traveler from 1928 was brought back to earth. The revelation by an Irish independent movie maker showed a still frame from the movie The Circus where a passerby looked to be hold a mobile phone to her ear. This launched a torrent of speculation about time travel and other theories.
Now experts say that the object could quite easily be a rectangular hearing of the kind seen at the time. Hearing device historians went on to provide images of aids from the time, which are rectangular in shape and could be mistaken for a phone in grainy images.
"As you can tell from the images, 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."
The more likely, but less romantic version of events has wide support among enthusiasts and experts alike. 19th-century resonator hearing aids such as ear trumpets were still made in large numbers well into the first decades of the 20th century, Skroska explained, and the basic designs didn't change much aside from incorporating newer, plastic-like materials.
