WHAT MAKES JACK TICK?

For at least 11 years, the head of Jack Husband, 20, of Hollis, Oklahoma, “ticked-tocked” night and day, and might have done so all his life. “Until somebody told me, I just thought everybody ticked,” he said. We are told that Mr Husband, a student at Southwestern State College in Weatherford, Oklahoma, had been examined by more than 200 doctors (!), none of whom had been able to learn the cause of the fast ticking, nor its exact location. It had never occurred to him that he was different from other people until, at the age of nine, he was wrestling with another boy. “What’s that?” the boy asked. He had noticed the metallic tick in young Husband’s head. A few days later he told his parents, Dr and Mrs Roy H Husband of Donna, Texas, and was taken to the first of a number of specialists, all of whom were at a loss to explain it.

Mr Husband said the noise stopped when he went up in a plane and that once it had stopped when he drove over a mountain pass in Mexico. The silence of those occasions, he said, “nearly drove me crazy”. The ticking could be heard through either ear, but it seemed louder in the left ear, and could be heard 4in (10cm) away. The sound had been heard over a telephone and had been recorded. Friends said he sounded “just like a clock”. Army doctors were puzzled when he appeared for his draft examination, but declared him “physically qualified”. He wanted to be a Navy pilot but one thing worried him. “How am I going to stand it,” he said, “when I go up in an airplane and I don’t tick any more?” [It would seem that Jack was suffering from “audible tinnitus”, a rare condition in which the sound of a muscular spasm in the throat is carried along the Eustachian tube and can be heard as a clocklike ticking outside.] NY Times, 26 Mar 1951.