ABSTRACT The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool in both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians of sound and science, and Post Office engineers in the inter-war period had considerable expertise in both telecommunications and hearing assistive devices. This article first demonstrates how the inter-war Post Office categorised different kinds of hearing loss through standardizing the capacity of its users to engage effectively with the telephone, and secondly investigates how successful it was in doing so. By utilising the substantial but little used material held by BT Archives, we can trace the development of the Post Office’s ‘telephone for deaf subscribers’ and explore how it was used to manage and standardise the variability of hearing and hearing loss within the telephone system.

中文翻译：

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两次世界大战期间英国电话听力损失的分类

摘要 在两次世界大战期间的英国，电话是识别和分类个人听力损失的重要工具。1912 年至 1981 年间，英国邮局控制了国有化的电话系统。长期以来，声音和科学历史学家都注意到电话和听力之间的联系，两次世界大战期间的邮局工程师在电信和听力辅助设备方面都拥有丰富的专业知识。本文首先展示了两次世界大战期间的邮局如何通过标准化其用户有效使用电话的能力来对不同类型的听力损失进行分类，其次调查它在这方面取得的成功。通过利用 BT Archives 拥有的大量但很少使用的材料，