How the Mosquito Ring Tone was born. The history of Mosquito Ring Tone dates back to 2005 to a British inventor by the name of Howard Stapleton who came up with an ingenious idea to keep teenagers from loitering outside of shops at night. The idea was meant to drive away teens through ultra high frequency sounds much like how a dog whistle would affect dogs. It was an idea to make the storefront very uncomfortable for the loitering teens while leaving the money spending adult customers unaffected. The product was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent taking advantage of the already well known product type of ultrasonic dog repellent. The product blasts a continuous ear-splitting 17KHz sound wave designed to disperse loitering teens from the storefront while leaving adults unaffected. “The Mosquito”, as the product was named, took advantage of a curious medical fact that most adults (and kids) are unaware of. Natural adult hearing loss is particularly acute at higher frequency ranges and most adults can not hear the ultra high frequency ranges after certain age due to a condition known as Presbycusis.
Presbycusis
The principle behind Presbycusis is a biological fact that hearing experts refer to as aging ear. Medical scientists state that starting at around age 20, the human ear begins to lose its ability to hear tones in the highest human-range frequencies (18-20 khz), and this condition progressively gets worse the older you get. Most adults over 40 or 50 exhibit some symptoms of this condition, but young adults are usually asymptomatic since most human reproduced audio waves and communication takes place in the range between 200 and 8,000 hertz. For this reason, the deterioration of the ability to detect ultra high frequencies generally go undetected. For more information, the following site offers a more technical and accurate description of the condition known as Presbycusis. As with any inventive good ideas, sooner or later someone is going to use it for something other then the original intended purpose. In this case, some equally inventive teens in the inventor’s hometown(Birmingham) caught on to what the company was doing and decided to put the idea to good use. They converted the same tone that is supposed to be irritating to teens but inaudible to adults to a cell phone ringtone which they aptly named “Teen Buzz”. As such, the “adult proof” ringtone known as the mosquito ringtone was born. The ringtone immediately caught on like wildfire in the UK, and has since quickly spread throughout the reaches of the internet to teens everywhere. As a curious note: The British press reported the first ironic use of the ultra high frequency ring tones on May 2006 at some schools in Wales, where, apparently, the original “yob-buster,”( a reference to the hooligans it was meant to disperse) The Mosquito device was introduced.
How the Mosquito Ring Tone was born. The history of Mosquito Ring Tone dates back to 2005 to a British inventor by the name of Howard Stapleton who came up with an ingenious idea to keep teenagers from loitering outside of shops at night. The idea was meant to drive away teens through ultra high frequency sounds much like how a dog whistle would affect dogs. It was an idea to make the storefront very uncomfortable for the loitering teens while leaving the money spending adult customers unaffected. The product was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent taking advantage of the already well known product type of ultrasonic dog repellent. The product blasts a continuous ear-splitting 17KHz sound wave designed to disperse loitering teens from the storefront while leaving adults unaffected. “The Mosquito”, as the product was named, took advantage of a curious medical fact that most adults (and kids) are unaware of. Natural adult hearing loss is particularly acute at higher frequency ranges and most adults can not hear the ultra high frequency ranges after certain age due to a condition known as Presbycusis.
The principle behind Presbycusis is a biological fact that hearing experts refer to as aging ear. Medical scientists state that starting at around age 20, the human ear begins to lose its ability to hear tones in the highest human-range frequencies (18-20 khz), and this condition progressively gets worse the older you get. Most adults over 40 or 50 exhibit some symptoms of this condition, but young adults are usually asymptomatic since most human reproduced audio waves and communication takes place in the range between 200 and 8,000 hertz. For this reason, the deterioration of the ability to detect ultra high frequencies generally go undetected. For more information, the following site offers a more technical and accurate description of the condition known as Presbycusis. As with any inventive good ideas, sooner or later someone is going to use it for something other then the original intended purpose. In this case, some equally inventive teens in the inventor’s hometown(Birmingham) caught on to what the company was doing and decided to put the idea to good use. They converted the same tone that is supposed to be irritating to teens but inaudible to adults to a cell phone ringtone which they aptly named “Teen Buzz”. As such, the “adult proof” ringtone known as the mosquito ringtone was born. The ringtone immediately caught on like wildfire in the UK, and has since quickly spread throughout the reaches of the internet to teens everywhere. As a curious note: The British press reported the first ironic use of the ultra high frequency ring tones on May 2006 at some schools in Wales, where, apparently, the original “yob-buster,”( a reference to the hooligans it was meant to disperse) The Mosquito device was introduced.