The first megaphone was invented when somebody cupped his or her hands together to create a conical amplifier for his or her voice. The acoustic principle was simple: the cone limited and concentrated the direction in which the sound of the voice traveled, so that it traveled faster and farther. Someone else more recently (Edison, according to many, although it is not clear), envisioned the modern megaphone as a tool for mass-communication. As an object, it was -still is- unassuming, bulky and unrefined, perfect to help the audience ignore it in order to concentrate on the speaker and the speaker’s message. Social and political activists worldwide such as Rosa Parks, in the picture, used it to address the many in a relatively effortless way. Those were the days when speaking in person did make a difference. That, in itself, is the great accomplishment of the megaphone: to be a prop for social and political activism. The poetics of the megaphone as a modern object are not as interesting: electric, battery-operated megaphones distort and transform the human voice significantly, giving it a metallic, gritty tone that makes communication more anonymous and distant from the speaker, as if the voice was really coming from an artifact alone, not a tool that someone is using. Is the megaphone worth redesigning/recuperating, then? Does it still have relevance as an agent of change? Perhaps a redesigned megaphone would bring along new social and political revolutions to challenge the status quo.
