Table 1.

A line of progress

Person(s) or event	Year	Comment or outcome
Merle Lawrence	1964	“Direct stimulation of the auditory nerve fibers with resultant perception of speech is not feasible.”
Blair Simmons	1966	Rated the chances that electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve might ever provide “uniquely useful communication” at about 5 percent.
Harold Schuknecht	1974	“I have the utmost admiration for the courage of those surgeons who have implanted humans, and I will admit that we need a new operation in otology, but I am afraid this is not it.”
Bilger et al.	1977	“Although the subjects could not understand speech through their prostheses, they did score significantly higher on tests of lipreading and recognition of environmental sounds with their prostheses activated than without them.” (This was a NIH-funded study of all 13 implant patients in the United States at the time.)
First NIH Consensus Statement	1988	Suggested that multichannel implants were more likely to be effective than single-channel implants, and indicated that about 1 in 20 patients could carry out a normal conversation without lipreading. (The world population of implant recipients was about 3,000 in 1988.)
Second NIH Consensus Statement	1995	“A majority of those individuals with the latest speech processors for their implants will score above 80 percent correct on high-context sentences, even without visual cues.” (The number of implant recipients approximated 12,000 in 1995.)
Gifford et al.	2008	Reported that over a quarter of CI patients achieve 100% scores on standard sentence material and called for more difficult material to assess patient performance. (The cumulative number of implant recipients now exceeds 120,000.)