But occasionally there’s a key barrier that appears insuperable and the people involved just can’t imagine that there could be a solution at all, let alone what that solution might look like.
That was the case for Sydney doctor, Graeme Clark, and his
team, who were working on ways to bring back hearing to people with deafness
problems by tapping into the cochlea part of the ear. The basic idea was to
introduce electrodes into it.
The problem was: how to squeeze twenty wires into a curling
tube within the ear, where the available gap was no wider than a needle.
Then, one day, Clark was on the beach and looking at a
Turban shell. Picking up some blades of grass, he discovered that they had
exactly the right combination of flexibility and stiffness to enable him to
push them into the shell, curling around until they reached the centre.
Eureka!
This was exactly the mechanical principle used for
electrodes in the cochlea implant – an invention that became known as the
bionic ear – giving back hearing to thousands.
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