This brings up my first challenge of developing a cochlear implant where it wasn't good enough to bring neurophysiology and electronics together to bring help to deaf people. It was necessary to discover how patterns of neural response were per- ceived and then how these percep- tions were consciously experienced as speech. To do this meant developing, in conjunction with the University of Melbourne's Department of Electri- cal Engineering, an implantable box of electronics for multi-channel stim- ulation of an array of nerve fibers in the inner ear. In 1978 it was the most complex package of electronics to be surgically inserted in a patient. Then in 1978 our most significant breakthrough occurred when we dis- covered that stimulating different fre- quency sites in the inner ear were not only perceived as pitch as occurs with sound waves, but were experienced as vowels. The vowels varied according to the site of excitation in the inner ear for the resonant frequencies of speech. The resonance depended on the shape of the oral cavity. This finding indicated that the neural connections in the brain had become arranged to decode information that was percep- tually important as speech. The discovery of a successful speech code on our first patient made it the first prosthesis to provide speech understanding for profoundly deaf people using elec- trical stimulation alone. This also occurred for a second patient who had been deaf many years indicating the conscious experience of speech could lie dormant through retained synaptic connections to brain cells and the enfolding of proteins in the cells. It was exciting to realize it was the first sensory-neural prosthesis to effectively bring electronic technology into a functional relationship with human consciousness. When the prosthesis gave spoken language to young children whose JUNE 2017 Figure 2. Clark with Rod Saunders, who was the first trial subject, with the prototype University of Melbourne receiver/stimulator, and the wearable speech processor that incorporated its initial coding strategy. Figure 3. A test arrangement for Rod Saunders where relatively soon after the surgery we discovered the most important finding that led to an effective coding strategy for speech understanding. This was that timbre for frequency place of stimulation also correlated with vowel perception, and the timbre of the pitch correlated with the second formant frequency of the vowel experienced. Thus it pointed to the fact that the brain was wired for this pattern of stimulation for the perception of pitch and the conscious experience of speech. Rod perceived sounds when stimulating different frequency regions of the cochlea. Stimulating the apical end of the cochlea was perceived as dull and the vowels experienced had low second formant frequencies and stimulating the basal end of the cochlea was perceived as sharp and also experienced as vowels but with high second formant frequencies. brains had never been exposed to speech and was approved by the US Food & Drug Administration, it became the first advance in helping ∕ IEEE Technology and Society Magazine profoundly deaf children to com- municate in the last 250 years. In addition, the success of the bionic ear also led to the creation of 39