Modern hearing protection largely owes its existence to 20th century warfare, which brought attention to the problem of noise-induced hearing loss. Soldiers’ ears were being assaulted by the cacophony of loud battles long before that, but the effects of those audio onslaughts on one’s ability to hear were not well understood. Still, as early as the 16th century, a French army surgeon named Ambroise Paré documented the acoustic trauma he observed in a number of the soldiers he treated.1
Two hundred years later, many of the men who fought in the Revolutionary War — including General George Washington - experienced hearing loss in their later years, possibly due to the clamor they were exposed to during battles. By the end of the American Civil War, nearly a third of Union Army soldiers had been diagnosed with some degree of hearing loss.2