Plantronics is a hardware company based in Santa Cruz, California, that specializes in lightweight headsets and is the market leader worldwide1.

History

In the early 1960s, airline headesets were so large and clunky, that many pilots had switched back to the use of handheld microphones for communications. The speed and complexity of jet airliners caused a need for the introduction of small, lightweight headsets into the cockpit. In 1961, United Airlines solicited new designs from anyone who was interested. Courtney Graham, a United Airline pilot, was one of the many who thought the heavy headsets should be replaced by something lighter. He collaborated with his pilot friend, Keith Larkin, to create a small, functional design which was robust enough to pass airlines standards. (Larkin had been working for a small company called Plane-Aids, a Japanese import company which offered spectacles and sunglasses that contained transistor radios in their temple pieces.) The final design, incorporating two small hearing aid-style transducers attached to a headband was submitted to United Airline approval. UAL's approval of the innovative design caused Graham and Larkin to incorporate as Pacific Plantronics (now called Plantronics, Inc.) on May 18, 1961. They introduced the first lightweight communications headset, the MS-50, to the commercial marketplace in 1962.

In the mid 1960s, the Federal Aviation Agency selected Plantronics as the sole supplier of headsets for air traffic controllers, and thereafter was selected to supply headsets to the operators of the Bell Telephone company.

SPENCOMM and NASA

In 1961, NASA astronaut, Wally Schirra contacted Courtney Graham, a fellow pilot, to discuss creating a design for a small, lightweight headset to be used in the Mercury spacecraft.

Pacific Plantronics assembled its Space Environmental Communications (SPENCOMM) division to begin working on a reliable solution. SPENCOMM personnel traveled to NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) and Kennedy Space Center to meet with and get design feedback from Schirra and several other astronauts, including Gordon Cooper.

Together, SPENCOMM and NASA spent only 11 days to create a working microphone design for space communications and Schirra was the first to use the new communication technology during the Sigma 7 (Mercury-Atlas 8) mission. Significant redundancy was built into these headsets, as each microphone circuit had two transducers and each receiver had 5 transducers--in addition, the headsets were used in pairs. The use of these SPENCOMM-NASA headsets in astronaut spacesuits continued through the remainder of the Mercury program, the Apollo program and on to this day.