The Womb Tune

It puts babies to sleep

The price is $40, but new parents may feel it is well worth it. For Rock-A-Bye-Bear is a Teddy bear that makes cranky infants drop right off to sleep. How? It is implanted with a device that plays the soothing sounds babies hear while still in the womb: the pulsing thump and whoosh made by blood coursing through their mothers' pelvic arteries.

The idea of using womb sounds to calm unruly newborns was first explored by the British and Japanese but did not hit the commercial big tune until Entrepreneurs Bob Bissett and Marie Shields teamed with Fort Lauderdale Obstetrician William Eller in 1975. Eller selected as their recording artist a nonsmoking, well-nourished pregnant woman, waited until she began labor and then inserted a tiny microphone through her dilated cervix into her uterus.

The resulting recording was first played back in hospital nurseries. Says Virginia Purdy, nursery supervisor at Fort Lauderdale's Holy Cross Hospital: "It's the most boring sound you've ever heard. It drives the help crazy." But the help noticed that infants usually dozed off within 15 seconds after the womb sounds began. That led to Rock-A-Bye-Bear which, with sales of 25,000 so far, may well be the sleeper of the year.

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