Over the Christmas holidays, we stayed at a nice Texas motel that had an exercise room. I usually take a daily bike ride for exercise, but as I didn't bring my bicycle with me, I did the next best thing and used a stationary bike. The bike had a video screen connected to the cable-TV system of the motel, and for the convenience of exercisers, the motel provided free disposable earbuds, so if you wanted to watch Metallica music videos, you wouldn't disturb the lady next to you who was tuned to PBS.
The earbuds worked fine, but I had never come across an establishment which provided them free of charge. It got me to thinking about how a thing which was once a high-tech piece of specialized and uncommon equipment has become a commodity so inexpensive that motels can afford to give them away.
The first device that transformed electrical impulses into audible speech was Bell's telephone receiver. You have probably seen old movies in which characters use the "candlestick" phone, consisting of a vertical stand with a transmitter that the user spoke into, and a "potato-masher" receiver that was held to the ear. The reason the potato-masher was as long as it was—several inches—wasn't for convenience in handling. All electromagnetic transducers (the technical term for a device that converts electric waves into sound waves) need a magnetic field, and producing a strong enough magnetic field to make the device work efficiently has always been one of the defining challenges of making receivers, headphones, and earphones.
In the 1890s, the best magnetic materials were lousy by today's standards. It took a U-shaped piece of iron about three or four inches long to make a strong enough magnetic field to work well as a telephone receiver, and so that was why the potato-masher was as long as it was.
By the early 1900s, materials had improved to the extent that the magnet was small enough to fit into a round can, and thus the headphone came to be developed. By 1930, you could buy a good pair of radio-quality headphones, the kind that fit over your head with a spring strap, for $1.09. I have an Allied Radio catalog published in Chicago which describes them as "[u]nusually sensitive headphones carefully designed with aluminum shells and genuine moulded caps." It's not clear why an imitation moulded cap would be a problem, but a certain amount of vivid writing was expected by the catalog reader of the day.
In 2024 dollars, those phones would cost $19.43, so how does a motel get by with giving their modern-day equivalent away? Advances in manufacturing, of course, and the most significant advance has been in the technology of magnetic materials.
Around 1990, it became possible to make what are called neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which produce the same magnetic field intensity as previous types but with a small fraction of the weight and size. Magnets made of NdFeB are why we can have excellent sound quality in tiny packages, and also why we can have small battery-powered drones (one of the reasons, anyway—lithium batteries are the other). And China, which bought the NdFeB technology from General Motors in the 1990s and ran with it, according to the economics website MacroPolo, makes the vast majority of all NdFeB magnetic materials today, although Japan and Germany still have toeholds in the high-end parts of the market. The U. S. is no longer a significant player in the technology, although we are one of the largest consumers.
The reason why the motel didn't provide a single public set of earbuds, the way nineteenth-century railroads used to provide a single public brush and comb chained to the washroom wall, is sanitation. I haven't seen any actual statistics on diseases known to be transmitted by reusing somebody else's earbuds, but I suppose it could happen. And there's the yuck factor of just thinking that somebody else's earwax is getting into your ear. Even if the motel provided more expensive non-ear-penetrating headphones with padding, there would still be skin-to-pad contact around the ear area, and so the easiest out is just to supply cheap disposable earbuds.
So what is the harm, if any, in using some inexpensive earbuds once and throwing them away?
For one thing, that decision adds to the stream of waste electronics flooding our landfills daily. As pollutants go, a pair of earbuds isn't that big a deal, but they are yet another example of the disposable society that is one of the driving themes of modernity. Magnets aren't exactly biodegradable, but it turns out that one of the more significant growth industries in the U. S. is the enterprise of picking through garbage to find NdFeB magnet material to recycle. An economic report by MacroPolo tells me that in the next few years, there may be a crunch in the NdFeB magnet supply chain. China can't make the best ones, Japan and Germany are maxed out, and the demand for magnets to go in everything from electric cars and wind turbines to drones and earbuds is increasing rapidly. So magnet material may become recycling gold if new sources of supply aren't found soon.
The libertarian economists among us would say, "Hey, if earbuds are cheap enough to throw away, don't worry about it. If it gets to be a problem, the price will go up and we'll do something else, maybe rent them and sterilize them." And they would have a point. But just because something is cheap doesn't mean that it's fine to throw it away after one or a few uses. Turns out that I kept my earbuds after we left the hotel, and now I have my own private set in my shaving kit if I ever come across another motel which isn't as generous with earbuds. And if the coming NdFeB magnet crunch comes to pass, I may be glad I kept mine.
Sources: I referred to a report "The Impermanence of Permanent Magnets: A Case Study on Industry, Chinese Production, and Supply Constraints" at https://macropolo.org/analysis/permanent-magnets-case-study-industry-chinese-production-supply/, and an original Allied Radio catalog for 1930 in my collection of antique catalogs.
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