Close examination of the Charlie
Chaplin film The Circus appears to show a woman at an event at Grauman's Chinese
Theatre in 1928, walking in front of the camera holding up an object to her ear.
The object is thin and black and appears to be a cellphone. Based on that, a
rumor spread that the woman was a time traveler.
Unfortunately, no.
The woman was more than probably
using a portable hearing aid. Archivists at the Bernard Becker Medical Library
of Washington University in St. Louis thought that the woman might have been
holding a rectangular but very small “ear trumpet” called an Acousticon, a
technology that was just being developed at the time.