Optacon - Previous History of Blind Reading Machine Development

Previous History of Blind Reading Machine Development

Amazingly, in 1913 a reading machine for the blind, called the optophone, was built by Fournier d’Albe in England. It used selenium photosensors to detect black print and convert it into an audible output which could be interpreted by a blind person. Only a few units were built and reading was exceedingly slow. In 1943, Vannevar Bush and Caryl Haskins of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development directed resources toward the development of technologies to assist wounded veterans. The Battelle Institute was provided with funding to develop an improved Optophone and Haskins Laboratories was funded to conduct research toward a synthetic speech reading machine. This group turned “sour” on the Optophone approach after concluding that reading would be too slow.

In 1957 U.S. Veteran’s Administration, Prosthetic and Sensory Aids Service (PSAS), under Dr. Eugene Murphy, began funding the development of a reading machine for the blind. The principal investigator on this project was Hans Mauch, a German scientist brought to the U.S. after World War II. (During World War II Mauch worked for the German Air Ministry as part of the German V-1 missile development team.)

Mauch worked on reading machines having an “optophone-like” output, a “speech-like” sound output, and a synthetic speech output. The only one of these that was competitive to the Optacon development was the Stereotoner, basically an improved optophone. The Stereotoner design concept was that the user would move a vertical array of photosensors across a line of text. Each photosensor would send its signal to an audio oscillator set to a different frequency, with the top photosensor driving the highest frequency and the bottom photosensor driving the lowest frequency. The user would then hear tones and chords from which the letters could be identified.

Initially Linvill was unaware that the Optacon was not the only reading machine for blind people under development. However, in 1961 James Bliss had returned to SRI from MIT where he had done a doctoral dissertation in a group working on the application of technology for the problems of blindness. Bliss was interested in basic research on the tactile sense, to better understand how it could be used to substitute for loss of vision. While at MIT, Bliss became aware of the existing research and development on reading machines for the blind, as well as the researchers and funding agencies. At SRI Bliss had obtained funding for his tactile research from the Department of Defense and NASA, who were interested in tactile displays for pilots and astronauts. This had enabled him to obtain a small computer and develop software to drive hundreds of tactile stimulators he had developed for research purposes. These tactile stimulators were small air jets, which were ideal for research because their arrangement and spacing could easily be changed and the contact to the skin was always assured. Bliss was studying how well subjects could recognize dynamic patterns presented on his array of air jet stimulators.