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96 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2022 A quick search online for photos of 18-year- old H. Day from the UK will show his 1922 invention of a top hat radio which appears to be the first invention of its kind. It was fol- lowed up 27 years later by inventor and gad- geteer Victor Hoeflich's introduction of the "Man from Mars, Radio Hat." e June 1949 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine had a two-page article describing the circuitry and construction of the radio. 2 e circuit was built on a flexible liner (Figure 3) that fit inside the hat which was covered by a chassis shield and a perfectly smooth interior liner. Hoeflich hoped his innovative packaging of a radio in a pith helmet would be a runaway success but just five years later, the pocket transistor radio was introduced, and the rest is history. Figure 1: The first ever in-ear headphones from 1891, were designed to be "worn without incon- venience" or hands-free. U.S. Patent No. 454,138. (Source: patents.google.com) Figure 2: Demo of early earbud technology with the now-familiar shape and a flexible wire. (Source: May 1926 issue of Science and Invention) Figure 3: The "Man from Mars, Radio Hat" internal circuit was built on a flexible liner. As shown in the schematic, the 1S5 vacuum tube converted the radio signal to audio and the 3V4 amplified the audio for the headphone. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)