Otacousticon.

From Jonathan Sawday’s letter in the LRB of 22 October I learn a wondrous word: The word ‘microphone’ has been the ‘standard term for a certain kind of auditory device since at least 1684’, David Trotter writes. We can go even further back. Perhaps the first microphone to have been imagined (if not constructed) can be found in a now forgotten academic comedy, Albumazar by Thomas Tomkis, performed at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1614. The device is named an Otacousticon, and described as a ‘receiver of sounds, as spectacles like eyes for sight’. It turns out to be no more than ‘a paire of Asses eares, and large ones’, fixed (presumably) on top of the user’s head. But fifty or so years later the Otacousticon had become a reality. In April 1668, Samuel Pepys, who delighted in gadgets of all kinds, recorded listening to an Otacousticon at a meeting of the Royal Society. The instrument was ‘a great glass bottle broke at the bottom’, with the help of which Pepys was able to ‘plainly hear…

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