It was a giant late-20s hearing aid (a 1924 Siemens heading aid, as the story goes). So says an expert on the matter–and conventional wisdom, really. That supposed time traveler gabbing on a cell phone, who popped up in footage from the 1928 Hollywood premier of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus was actually fiddling with her hearing aid–which, it turns out, were giant back then.
“As you can tell from these, old-fashioned mechanical or resonating hearing aids were not necessarily long and rounded,” a St. Louis-based archivist told MSNBC. “Short, compact rectangular forms were not unusual.”
The hearing aid explanation has been around for about as long as the rumor. It’s a logical, if not particularly exciting answer to the question that has befuddled the Web for the past week or so. What it doesn’t explain, however, is why the woman appears to be talking to someone who’s not right there.
“Now, I can’t really explain why the woman appears to be talking (other than yelling at the man who quickened his pace ahead of her),” Skroska said. “But I think it’s fair to say it would be a hasty judgment to dismiss the possibility that it was a hearing aid she was holding up to her ear.”
Clearly she had to shout so the person on the other line in the future could hear speaking on a cell phone that apparently worked without the aid of wireless towers or satellites.
Duh.
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