[nessus42]

When I was a kid, I once brought a stethoscope with me on the airplane so that I could watch the movie for free. (Or rather listen to it.) I pulled off the heart-listening cup part of the stethoscope and inserted beverage straws into the rubber tubing. Then I put one straw into each of the two little holes in the armrest.

It worked perfectly! Until a stewardess caught me and made me stop.

[blendo]

Thus sparking the engineer’s natural distrust of authority figures.

[porknubbins]

Sounds ingenious but I don’t quite follow the story. Why would a stewardess make you stop? Was there some system where you had to pay for headphones separately to hear a movie? I’m pretty sure all I remember are headrests having standard 1/8” audio jacks.

[bdowling]

Yes, they would charge for headphones to watch the movie. The movie (there was only one, or maybe two on a long international flight) was played on CRT monitors mounted on the ceiling of each cabin section.

That was 20+ years ago, before flat panel screens in every headrest that could tune into one of a couple dozen looping channels, and long, long before you could watch anything at any time from a huge library.

[dpig_]

You skipped too far into the future with the "huge library" bit. Fixed:

"long, long before you could watch [Season 2, Episodes 4 - 6 of Comedy Central Roast]."

[turnsout]

Before that, they actually ran film projectors in some planes, using a variety of half-baked schemes.[0] Wild times!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-flight_entertainment#Histor...

[thfuran]

No, they had holes that sounds came out of and the headphones were just long tubes plugged into the hole to convey the sound to your ear. Like the article. They'd rent the headphones to you.

[cortesoft]

I used to just pull the armrest up next to my ear and listen directly out of the hole.

[bookofjoe]

I would've moved you up to First Class for being so inventive.