The Voice Scrambling Helmet

Adventures in Toy Design: Part 1

We had this toy idea for a voice scrambling helmet.

It was 1979 (or thereabouts). The helmet would cover your face completely (think Darth Vader™), have an internal microphone and headset, and an external microphone and speaker. The child would put it on their head, turn it on, and speak. Circuitry in the helmet would scramble the child’s voice and output the garbled speech through the external speaker. The helmet would be sound insulated enough such that the child’s speaking voice was muffled, ensuring that the only thing that was heard externally was the unintelligible speech coming out of the external speaker.

If you were not wearing a helmet, you could not understand what was being said; you essentially heard “alien-speak.” Conversely, if you were within earshot and had a helmet on, the garbled speech would be picked up by your helmet’s external microphone, processed (unscrambled), and played through the internal headset in your helmet. For fun, a switch would allow the users to choose different types and styles of scrambled alien voices. Additionally, a security setting common to a set of helmets could keep that dialogue private between those users only.

The helmets would be sold in pairs. Imagine kids being able to have a conversation among themselves in an alien language with…