The young woman in this picture wanted to listen to the TV privately, but didn’t want to put up with the dreaded “headphone fatigue.” Fortunately, her late 50s living room contained the perfect speaker enclosure that could be placed right next to her ear, namely, one of the “bullets” of the ubiquitous pole lamp.

Very little modification of the lamp was necessary. Each lamp had a separate cord running to the base, so it was an easy matter to disconnect one set of wires and add an extension to run to the speaker terminals. To mount the speaker, an ordinary AC plug was added, and that was plugged in to an adapter similar to the one shown at the right. You then tapped into the speaker leads inside the set, and you could listen to a speaker nestled in the “bullet.”

Pole lamps of this type are still available at Amazon, so there’s no reason why you couldn’t duplicate this feat today. The instructions for the project appeared in the July 1959 issue of Popular Mechanics.