From watches to pacemakers. The history of Wearables

I’m very happy to have the privilege of introducing you to the history of wearables, which is full of interesting curiosities. So, what was the first wearable device?

Spectacles. The first spectacles were invented in about 1284 in Italy. The earliest depiction of spectacles is in a painting in a series of frescoes dated 1352, by Tommaso de Modena, which you can see in the Chapter House of the Seminario in the Basilica of San Nicolo in Treviso.

The watch first appeared in pocket form in the 15th century. By developing the mainspring, German inventor Peter Henlein, was able to create watches which were worn as necklaces and did not require falling weights as the source of their power. A century later, men began to carry watches in their pockets. It is believed that the first luxury wristwatch belonged to Queen Elizabeth, given to her by Earl Robert Dudley in 1571. Wristwatches were also created in the late 1600s but were worn mostly by women as bracelets. Over time, the watch became smaller, in multiple sizes.

In 1904, the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont pioneered the use of the wristwatch as it allowed him to keep his hands free while piloting. He proved that the wrist is a convenient place to wear a watch, and this led people to start using wristwatches.

There was also the so-called abacus ring, a 1.2 x 0.7 cm ring developed during the Qin dynasty era, at the turn of the 1700s, to help traders. It was a sort of forefather of the digital watch, with a calculator inside.

In the 18th century, the forerunner of the hearing aid, the so-called ‘ear trumpet’, was invented. An ear trumpet was for helping people with reduced hearing to hear better and was therefore designed to provide an acoustic impedance match between sound from the air to the ear. Sound does not like to change medium where it propagates. When a travelling sound meets a different medium, it prepares to return to where it came from, and the more different the medium, the more it flees, from air to brick wall, for example, or to water.

In order to make the sound travel, we need a transition medium with an acoustic characteristic halfway between the first and the second medium. Exactly the same thing happens with electromagnetic waves; they need an antenna as a halfway medium between the electronic board and the ear.

The very first patented in-ear headphones were invented by Ernest Mercadier in 1891. Some years later, in 1949, the Radio Hat was developed as a real hat with embedded circuitry made of vacuum tubes, a progenitor of transistors.

Wearables were developed to spy on people, too. In the 1950s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, adopted the world’s first button camera, hidden in a button or a trench coat. This is why, when we think about spies, we think of trench coats. Now, people have begun to create wearables to use on every occasion, from tools that help them win gambling, to rings used as a computational device by traders, headbands used in theatre costumes, and wearables cameras strapped to a bird to take aerial photos, among others.

Wearables have become so sophisticated that nowadays you can wear a wool computer on you. The first wearable computer was embedded into a shoe for gambling, as far back as 1961. The inventor, Ed Thorp, designed a particular shoe to beat the roulette tables in casinos. This strange wearable computer worked like that: a switch booted up the computer and another timed the wheel and the ball. Once the wheel spin was measured, the computer sent a musical scale whose eight tones mapped the eight quadrants passing a reference point. He could hear the music in a small earphone. The experimental results proved successful, and his theory was verified when he won $11,000 in a single weekend.

In 1979, Steve Mann developed the prototype with a 1.5-inch cathode ray tube in a version of the TV set. A bit uncomfortable, isn’t it?

And what about implanted electronics? Wearables have gone on to become invasive in the sense that they are implantable. The first cardiac pacemaker was developed in 1952, but it was so big that the patient had to push it around like a shopping cart.

Rune Elmqvist developed the first implantable pacemaker in 1958. Today we know just how important Elmqvist’s invention of the pacemaker was, and the millions of lives it has saved, but Elmqvist was so sceptical that his invention had a future that he referred to his pacemakers as little more than a “technological curiosity”. Elmqvist was a multi-disciplinary inventor. A decade previously, in 1984, he came up with the first inkjet printer used for electrocardiography.

You could call implantable devices the last frontiers as far as wearables are concerned. Consider, for instance, implantable brain computer interface (BCI) devices. These devices are literally inserted into the human brain. Some people are “locked in”, it means that they are completely paralysed and cannot move muscles in their entire body. They cannot work or use arms or hands to pick up objects. Researchers developed the BCI as a breach from the human brain directly to a machine. So, a paralysed person can control the movements of a bionic arm by just thinking about moving their arm and the BCI interface will do the rest.

Chris Dancy is known as the most connected man on the Earth, all because of his wearables, and he thinks that we will become part-machine, part-software and part flesh. I would also urge you to look at wearables from another perspective. If you change perspective, you’ll see something unbelievable. Look at this picture, for instance. You could think this place is unknown to you, a beautiful, strange piece of architecture, but in fact it is just the inside of a guitar. Another wearable.

I don’t want to go on about the most common wearables like smart watches, 3D glasses for virtual or augmented reality, etc., I want to talk about new types of wearables and the reasons why we will grow to love them. The most important one for the user is that they will help us lead a better quality of life. The most important one for businesspeople is that they will help us to make money.

Let’s talk about making money. In the 17th century, the rich people were the ones who had the large estates. At the turn of the 19th and 20th century, the rich were those who owned the factories. But in the middle of the 20th century, the wealthy were those who ran the tertiary sector. But today, business is revolving around data. Those who are able to source data, to analyse data and to store a large amount of data hold the key to power and richness.

Wearables are the most important source of data ever, and this trend will become more and more pervasive. All of us will be using more and more wearables, especially as we are the source of the most important kind of data there is: health-related data.

Join me next time where I will talk about off-the-shelf wearables and some others that are on the way which you would not dare to imagine.