The Hugh Hetherington On-line
Hearing Aid Museum
This on-line museum is the brainchild of Neil Bauman,
Ph.D. the Executive Director of the Center for Hearing Loss Help, and Hugh
Hetherington, the main collector of this valuable historical resource.
The Hearing Aid Museum displays the antique hearing aids and related devices
contained in the private collections of both Hugh Hetherington and Neil Bauman.
Hugh Hetherington
 Hugh Hetherington is a retired telephone engineer whose interest in early
hearing aids began in the 1950's. As an employee of a telephone installation
company he purchased a second hand 1950s vacuum tube hearing aid in order to
adapt it as a cable tracer for use in telephone offices by adding a magnetic
pickup to the unit. This magnetic pickup which is now common in most hearing
aids today is called a telecoil.
Ironically, Hugh now has a high frequency hearing loss which developed while
he was working in the noisy step-by-step telephone offices in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hugh is a director of the North Shore Branch (North Vancouver, B.C.) of the Canadian Hard of
Hearing Association (CHHA). During his retirement, he has worked extensively with the CHHA to develop programs for the North Shore Branch. He is the editor of their
newsletter Mountain Ear and often lectures on hearing loss issues, including
the history of hearing aids.
Over the past thirty years, Hugh has collected more than 700 hearing aids and
related devices which date from the middle of the 19th century through to the
current day.
Neil Bauman
 Dr. Neil was born with a severe hearing loss and has worn hearing aids since
1955. He started out wearing one of the first transistorized hearing aids and has
progressed though to the latest digital technology over the past 50 plus years.
Dr. Neil is the Executive Director of the
Center for Hearing Loss Help. The
Center helps people all
over the world effectively cope with their hearing
losses.
No stranger to collecting hearing aids himself, Dr. Neil also has hundreds of
antique hearing aids and related devices in his own private collection. As much
as possible, Dr. Neil collects hearing aids that Hugh doesn't have, thus the two
collections are mostly complementary, and continue to expand the Hearing Aid
Museum.
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