This week’s Friday Find – The Isolator – is pretty old school (1925).  As mentioned on Laughing Squid, The Isolator deafens the user, fills itself with oxygen and offers only a tiny slit through which the user can see.  This entire contraption…built to help isolate people from external noises, so they could focus easier.

And while I doubt you can find The Isolator available for purchase, I still think it’s worth sharing with you guys…for a few reasons:

1. I discovered The Isolator on Distractify this morning, which totally fits the ADD / ADHD, distracting nature of this blog.  (Also, it successfully distracted me as I had to find out more about this crazy focus-inducing helmet.)

2. …and it’s Friday (getting close to Saturday again) and I don’t have a Friday Find yet…so it just makes sense.

3. The Isolator looks pretty ridiculous and you guys can appreciate such things.

4. The fact that someone (Hugo Gernsback) back in 1925 felt the need to create The Isolator proves that people have been struggling with ADHD-type distractibility for a long time.

5. It also proves, like I mentioned in my first post, that these same ADHDers (or otherwise generally distractible folk) are pretty damn resourceful and are constantly trying to come up with creative solutions to the issues that plague them.

“Outside noises being eliminated, the worker can concentrate with ease upon the subject at hand.” –> Can you imagine being handed The Isolator as an accommodation at work?  Can you say…claustrophobic!

Quick shout out to A Great Disorder (blog).  While I referenced Laughing Squid’s article for a lot of this, they credited A Great Disorder with a lot of it.