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Breathing LessonsThe peculiar pleasure of earplugs.

By Thomas BellerPosted Tuesday, March 20, 2007, at 7:19 AM ET

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Gardener and his team discovered earplugs as a byproduct of a project called "joint sealants." Gardener was developing a resin that had unusual properties of energy absorption. This material, by coincidence, was abbreviated to E-A-R.

It took a while for Ross to start thinking about E-A-R in terms of ears. Then he began talking to Curt Holmer, a young acoustic consultant, about the idea of a soft barrier to sound, a kind of molecular shock absorber. A foam earplug would be soft, he and Holmer thought. But it would also be porous, and that seemed counterintuitive for blocking big noises.

Still, Gardner devised a test, cajoling an audience into putting foam cylinders into their ears. Gardener spoke to them and ascertained that they could hear him. Then he took a hammer and started pounding a plate of steel. He asked if the group could hear anything. His account of the answer has the slight stiffness of someone suppressing great excitement. "While still pounding the plate, I asked them to take out their earplugs," he wrote in a paper co-authored with a colleague, Elliott Berger. "Not suspecting how much noise the plugs were blocking they complied, and then no longer being protected from the fearsome racket were quickly driven from their seats."

A product was born. Earplugs are currently manufactured by 24 different companies and can be bought on nearly every continent. The leading manufacturer, Howard Leight Industries, reports annual sales of $120 million. Gardner has since died, but Elliott Berger is still in the earplug business, working for E-A-R/Aearo Technologies, the company into which National Research evolved. He is a kind of acoustical eminence, and when I spoke to him, I noted a certain fastidiousness in the way he talked about his ears. He agreed with me that earplugs were useful in many situations beyond ones in which the noise was extremely loud. He uses them at concerts where the volume is uncomfortable. Even at movies! He spoke of his ears with a deep appreciation, as though they were fragile, delicate gateways to the world of auditory delights.

I wore earplugs well past the moment when the renovations on my block were finished. Eventually, though, this became too jarring on a daily basis. When you go through your day with earplugs it feels a bit like you are in an air-traffic control tower, watching the landings and take-offs off around you. This is great as a novelty, but not as a routine. I stopped using earplugs regularly.

But I return to them now and then, and they never fail to provide a thrill. There's the pleasure of calming the world around you to the point where you can hear your own thoughts. And then there is the real treat to wearing earplugs: The moment when you have arrived at your destination—a quiet desk, a park, or maybe home, where a loved one waits—and you take them out, and the whole world comes rushing delightfully in, bright and somehow new.