Check out my latest post over on Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts:

A conversation tube is a non-electric, acoustic device designed to amplify sounds for deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals and is constructed of a flexible tube with a mouthpiece at one end and an ear piece at the other. The device dates to the seventeenth-century, when Puritan couples used them to have private conversations while courting, as social customs of the day limited their interaction in presence of family members (Wellcome Images). During the nineteenth-century, many versions of the conversation tube were manufactured for personal use…

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