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Earpods Actually Named After Amelia Earhart

Veröffentlicht am 2024-10-08 von Ben Kaps

Imagine this: it's September 2012, you just waited five hours in front of the Apple Store to buy the brand-new iPhone 5. You open it and, beneath your blazingly fast handheld phone, is a pair of cutting edge wired earphones. Apple geniously called them EarPods, a name which perfectly encapsulates how innovative they are.1 Surely, they must have been the first to coin this name, right?

A poorly drawn portrait of a young person wearing Earphones. Starting outside their ears are sound waves emitted, indicating very loud music. The person has a shape resembling the apple logo in their eyes.
You, thinking that Apple invented the word “EarPods”.

Amelia Earhart, food scientist

Surprisingly, the name existed over a hundred years before Apple popularized it. And its inventor is no other than pioneer aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Growing up, Earhart would experiment with breeding vegetables and trying alternative ways to prepare food. One of her studies consisted of asking her mother to cook unshelled peas, still in their pods. But instead of piloting the next innovation of Iowan cuisine, the resulting dish ended up being subpar.2

An edited image showing a vintage kitchen with a boiling pot of water on a gas stove. Inside the pot are two unshelled pea pods. Two wojaks are pointing at the peas, fascinated.
Not an actual image of Amelia's Earpods3 4 5 6

Although the food itself was kinda bad, it led to the creation of a perculiar name. Whenever someone in her family referred back to this failed experiment, they would call it “Earpods”, with “Ear” coming from her last name and “Pods” coming from the fact that the peas were still in their pods. Obviously, this has nothing to do with wired earphones, as people at that time were still listening to phonographs. It's just a complete coincidence, having literally no impact whatsoever.

Does it matter tho?

No, absolutely not. I just think that we should appreciate small quirky pieces of history more often, as they help us see historical figures as ordinary people and give an insight into their daily lives. Next post (hopefully): George Washington scared of being buried alive.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_headphones#EarPods ↩︎

  2. Butler, S. (2009). East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart. DaCapo Press. (pp. 44-45)↩︎

  3. Vintage Wedgewood Stove by Salvation Army USA West, CC-BY-2.0 ↩︎

  4. Boiling Water by Scott Akerman. CC-BY-2.0. ↩︎

  5. Little Crunch Snap Peas by Swallowtail Garden Seeds. CC-BY-2.0. ↩︎

  6. I made this new soijak by Anonymous. ↩︎