Samuel was a Chicago businessman and lawyer who suffered from partial deafness. Having never married nor having any children, he established the Parmly Trust in 1942 to be used at an Illinois university to fund a research department devoted to the "causes, cure and relief of human deafness" and provide "scientific aid to and education of the deaf and partially deaf."

The Parmly Research Foundation was formed at the Illinois Institute of Technology that year. In 1959, the scientific personnel at Parmly formed the nonprofit Parmly Hearing Institute and the following year the trust was terminated at the university because its focus had shifted from physics to psychology.

In 1961, the Parmly Hearing Institute was formally established at Loyola. The institute continues to conduct research on a broad range of topics in basic hearing science and continues to be supported by individual research grants from the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.