Stethoscope is an audio-medical instrument, which is used for the purpose of listening to heart beats and breathing. It was discovered in the year 1816 by a French physician Rene Laennec at Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. He was inspired by two small children who were hearing the scratching of a pin that was transmitted through the length of a wooden beam. Watching this, he got an idea to design a paper tube to listen to the sound from the patient’s chest. He rolled 24 sheets of paper and put its one end to his ear and another on a woman’s chest and was very happy to see that sound was not only travelling to paper cone but also as clear and loud.
In 1851, a Harvard school professor, Arthur Leared, invented the binaural stethoscope. With the growth in the field of science and technology in the year 1960, Dr. David Littmann shaped a new light-weight stethoscope. In the year 1999, the first of its kind of external noise-reducing stethoscope was copyrighted by Richard Deslauriers.
