Loudspeaker

Early-twentieth-century poet G. K. Chesterton once said: "The moment in history when we had nothing important left to say was marked by the invention of the loudspeaker." The device makes it possible to listen to a Wagner opera-or any other "unimportant" stuff-while taking a bath, riding the subway or hiking in the forest. We can hear the electronically preserved voices of people long dead, as well as a universe of sounds unlike anything in nature. In a movie theater, loudspeakers surround us with sound and transport us into illusion. From Hitler to Hendrix, the century's charismatic figures have reached the public through speakers.

Since the loudspeaker came on the scene around 1915, there's been a constant quest to perfect the illusion. Now that audio recording and storage technologies are so good, loudspeakers are "easily the weakest link in the home audio system," says William R. Short, Bose fellow at Bose Corp. in Framingham, Mass., and co-inventor of Bose's Acoustic Wave system. "No way am I going to sit in my living room and imagine that I'm actually in Symphony Hall. It just doesn't happen, and we really don't know why yet."