8The European devices — Chouard & MED-EL
The cochlear implant is sometimes told as an American–Australian story, but Europe was there from the start, and one of the three manufacturers that dominate the world market today is European. In Paris, the surgeon Claude-Henri Chouard built an early multichannel device in the 1970s, picking up the thread the French had begun with Djourno and Eyriès. In Vienna, Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair developed a multichannel implant — including pioneering long, flexible electrode arrays — that grew into MED-EL, now a global leader. This module completes the cast of the multichannel era and traces how today's manufacturers descend from these separate beginnings.
FEurope in the multichannel race
Having given the field its very origin (Djourno and Eyriès, Module 3), France and the wider European scene stayed in the contest. Through the 1970s and 1980s, European groups built multichannel devices in parallel with the Australian and American efforts — and one of them produced a company that is, today, among the largest cochlear-implant manufacturers in the world.
CChouard in Paris
Claude-Henri Chouard, a French ear surgeon, developed a multichannel cochlear implant in Paris in the 1970s, consciously continuing the French line of work. His device demonstrated that the multichannel approach was being pursued seriously on several continents at once. As a commercial product the French device did not ultimately survive into the modern market, but it is an important part of the historical record and a reminder that the multichannel idea had broad independent support.
CThe Hochmairs and MED-EL
In Vienna, the engineers Ingeborg Hochmair and Erwin Hochmair developed a multichannel cochlear implant beginning in the late 1970s. Their work was notable for pursuing long, flexible electrode arrays intended to reach further along the cochlea and cover more of its frequency range. Their device grew into the company MED-EL, now one of the major global manufacturers. Ingeborg Hochmair's contribution was later recognised with a share of the 2013 Lasker Award (Module 13).[2013]
FTThe surviving manufacturers
It is worth seeing how the pioneering programs map onto the devices a clinician encounters today. Three manufacturers dominate the modern market, and each descends from a distinct historical lineage — Australian, Austrian, and American.
CA field of competitors
The survival of several independent manufacturers, descended from separate research programs, has shaped the modern field in a concrete way: it created competition in electrode design, coding strategy and processor engineering that has driven steady improvement. The device-specific differences a programming audiologist navigates today (covered in the Objective Measures chapter) are the living trace of these distinct origins.
We have now assembled the hardware and the players. But multichannel devices in the early-to-mid 1980s still gave only modest speech results. The transformation — the single most important advance in the implant's performance — came not from new electrodes but from a new way of coding sound: the speech-coding breakthrough (Module 9).
Which statement is historically accurate?
Which major modern manufacturer grew from the Hochmairs' work in Vienna?
What is true of the French contribution to the cochlear implant?