This Maico Audiometer was one of many devices used by health and safety consultants of the Employers Mutual Liability Insurance Company of Wisconsin throughout the mid-to-late 1960s.

Employers Mutual was the very first workers compensation insurance company in the United States. The company was founded in Wausau, Wisconsin, in 1911 shortly after the nation’s first workers compensation law was passed in the state. The company would exert an especially powerful influence on workplace safety through its many educational posters, magazines, and other publications. Testing employee hearing and workplace noise levels was one of the company’s landmark innovations.

Audiometers were first developed in the 1920s to produce a set of standard tones on specific frequencies to test the limits of a person’s hearing and to check for existing hearing loss. Newer models of audiometers were developed to be more reliable and portable, and by the mid-1950s Employers Mutual had embraced audiometers as an indispensable tool in preventing hearing loss. Employers Mutual developed one of the first hearing-loss prevention programs, and a major part of that program was testing the hearing of employees of policyholders with noisy shops and factories using audiometers.

This particular audiometer was used in the mid-to-late 1960s by Helen Onyett, an Occupational Health Consultant based at a small branch office in Indianapolis, Indiana. She took this audiometer to workplaces across the Midwest to test the hearing of employees hired by Employers Mutual policyholders. When this model was retired and replaced by more advanced technology in the late 1960s, Onyett’s audiometer was stored in the Hearing Laboratory at the Wausau Headquarters. In the early 2000s, the unit was donated as part of the Employers Mutual archival collection to the Marathon County Historical Society.

Written by Ben Clark, November 2016.

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The Audiometer was one of the devices used by health and safety consultants of the Employers Mutual Liability Insurance Company of Wisconsin throughout the mid-to-late 1960s. Employers Mutual was the very first workers compensation insurance company in the United States.

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Produced for Wisconsin Life by Erika Janik

Founded in Wausau, WI, in 1911, America’s first workers compensation insurance company started using equipment like the Employers Mutual Audiometer to develop new standards of workplace safety.

Listen below to the segment on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life:

Transcript

Erika Janik:
Employers Mutual was the first workers compensation insurance company in the United States. Ben Clark tells us about the company’s innovative test for workplace noise levels as part of Wisconsin 101.

Ben Clark:
The audiometer. It’s not a very big box, it’s not very heavy, and on the front it’s stenciled, Employers Mutual of Wausau in white letters. But I think the audiometer was interesting because it is, it’s maybe a little bit more relatable. I think most people today have gone through the process of having their hearing tested with an audiometer at some point.

Employers Mutual was founded in response to an really important law that was passed, the Workers Compensation Insurance Law of 1911. The law itself was the first workers compensation legislation to be passed in the United States, the first constitutionally upheld law. Before the law passed, there really wasn’t a system for getting workers compensation at all. If you got hurt at work, you really didn’t have a lot of recourse. You basically, you were replaceable. There wasn’t even really any protections for safety or any sort of regulations at the time. So if you got hurt, the only way that you really could get any compensation from your employer would be to take them to court and to sue them for negligence.

And so in Wausau, there was a group of investors, loosely called the Wausau Group, the sort of guys who had come to Wausau back in the 1800s and had gotten rich off of owning the lumber mills and lumber companies and all of that, and they made a decision to stick around in Wausau, even as the lumber industry was suffering because we had cut down all the big trees. They built a bunch of different really successful companies. When the law passed, they kind of recognized that this is the way that things were going to head. And so they formed Employers Mutual to write policies under the new law for their companies. Some of the very first hires were experts that would go out and consult on basic workplace hygiene or first aid and simple things. In the ’20s, it was the things they were worried about were a little bit more obvious, you know, not having loose clothing that’s going to get caught in a machine and rip your arm off. If you think about the business model of a company that does workers compensation, it makes sense to invest in outreach to make sure that people are safer at work.

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Ben Clark:
1953. That’s the year when there’s a court case that established that hearing loss could be something you could claim in workers compensation in Wisconsin, at least. And that was sort of the first time, and it’s kind of interesting that it takes that long. And there’s a bunch of reasons for it. I think part of it is it’s not something that’s noticeable. If you, you know, break your arm or something like that, it’s, it’s pretty clear that you, it happens in an instant. If you don’t put headphones on or your hearing protection for five minutes, you’re probably not going to lose your hearing. You know, most people don’t recognize, well, this amount of noise that I’m experiencing right now is 5/10 more decibels, than I need, I should be safely exposed to.

Employers Mutual was this national company and had branches all over but they remained headquartered in Wausau, and even though they had employees all over the place. A lot of the policy decisions were very much created by people who lived here, people based in Wisconsin. So with the hearing it took Wisconsin making the decision that hearing loss was something you could get workers compensation for, and that became the thing that caused Employers Mutual to invest and and really look at how to reduce hearing loss in the workplace.

Erika Janik:
Wisconsin 101 is a collaborative effort to share Wisconsin’s story in objects. Wisconsin Life is a co-production of Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television in partnership with the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Additional support comes from Lowell and Mary Peterson of Appleton, find more Wisconsin life on our website, wisconsinlife.org and on Facebook. I’m Erika Janik.