Graeme Clark’s dogged pursuit of the technology enabled hundreds of thousands of people to hear
“A bit of bedlam.” That’s how the physician Graeme Clark described the scene at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, on the day before what would be the most important surgery of his career.
Engineers and staff were running around with last-minute equipment tests. Meanwhile, Clark’s patient, Rod Saunders, was relaxed. Saunders had lost his hearing in a car accident two years earlier, and Clark planned to implant a prototype device to restore at least some of Saunders’s hearing. Perhaps Saunders’s sense of calm came from the belief that his life was about to be transformed; more likely, he was feeling the effects of the Valium he’d taken.
The following day, 1 August 1978, over the course of a 9-hour operation, Clark and surgeon Brian Pyman painstakingly inserted a multichannel cochlear implant behind Saunders’s left ear. They were able to attach electrodes to the cochlea—the spiral cavity within the inner ear that stimulates the auditory nerve—without much difficulty, moving slowly and taking steps to minimize the chance of infection. The surgery appeared to be successful, but as Clark recalled in a 2011 oral history with the Australian Academy of Science, he still slept fitfully that night, worried about his patient.