.
Of course, the controversy over cochlear implants did not develop over night. The very first attempt of stimulating auditory nerves through the electrodes was performed by Volta in 200 years ago, the 18th century (15). However, the first modern attempt at electrical stimulation had not been occurred until late 1950s. In 1957 in Paris, French otologist Charles Eyries and his colleague A. Djourno performed a surgery in which the auditory nerves in the cochlear were electrically stimulated by implanting the electrodes on a deaf man (15). Cochlear is the snail-shaped coil in the inner part of the a ear which includes the site where "the sound receptors transform mechanical vibrations into nerve impulses (Graaff 521). After subsequent electrical stimulation, the patient reported hearing of a few different sounds, noises, and some common words (16). Eyries and Djourno's successful attempt of stimulating cochlear nerves by electrical circuit was "the first crude use of cochlear implants" and promoted the development of advanced researches on the implants in the following years (Issues and Controversies) and became the very first step of study of cochlear implants today.
The next step was taken four years after Eyries and Djourno had performed their surgery in France. In 1961 Dr. William House, an otologist is Los Angeles, and his team made another attempt to electrically stimulate the auditory nerve ending in cochlear. Dr.House was "the true pioneer of single-electrode implantation" (Fagan et al. 76). While House focused on developing a single-channel implant, other researchers continued studying on multichannel implants in the United States, France, and Australia (Spencer 17). Implants were designed either in single or multiple channels. "Multichannel implants features a number of electrodes on the electrodes array that is inserted into the cochlear, whereas single-channel implants have only one electrode pair" (Spencer 16).
