STS Colloquium - Mara Mills
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Morrill Hall, 423, Tompkins
On the Limits of ‘Tinkering’: Testing the Cochlear Implant at Bell Telephone Laboratories (1964-1978) Despite rising interest in brain implants, little has been written about the first multichannel cochlear implant, which set the stage for the commercial neurotechnology in use today. When otolaryngologist Blair Simmons of Stanford first provided a 6-channel implant to a 61-year old Bay Area resident in 1964, the two flew to the East Coast for speech processor testing at Bell Telephone Laboratories. A team of junior scientists known for their experimental electronics research spent the next three weeks exploring the possibilities for “psychoelectric” hearing, among them Newman Guttman (the first person to compose computer music), Leon Harmon (a founder of computer art), and Lawrence Frishkopf (an expert on frog listening and handwriting recognition). This group, now recalled for their contributions to the digital present, considered the cochlear implant experiment to be startling but ultimately a failure. Through interviews and archival research, I reconstruct this unusual event. Far from a failure, I argue that it represents a turning point as cochlear implants became speech processors, incorporating vocoder technology from Bell Labs in subsequent models. This early moment in cochlear implant development also provides an opportunity to rethink the history and politics of “tinkering” in STS, an activity alternately aligned with engineering and with disability design justice and other forms of “innovation from below.” Mara Mills is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and Director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies, a hub for public humanities and disability arts programming. At CDS, she is currently coordinating the Mellon-funded project ASAP: Access for Small Arts Partnerships. She is most recently coeditor of the collections How to be Disabled in a Pandemic (NYU Press, 2025), winner of the 2026 Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, and Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023), a 2024 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. With Michele Friedner, she is currently editing a collection of historical and ethnographic essays titled "The Global Cochlear Implant," funded by an NEH Dangers and Opportunities of Technology grant. And she is completing a book coauthored with Jonathan Sterne on the history, aesthetics, and politics of time stretching technology, to be previewed as a podcast series produced by Benjamen Walker. She is also a founding editorial board member of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. **ASL/English interpretation will be provided