Deaf TTY inventor - Robert Weitbrecht

A blast from the past: Who is Robert Weitbrecht? Hint: He was a deaf engineer who invented teletypewriter (TTY)!

Transcript: For almost one hundred years after the invention of telephone, deaf people had to use multiple techniques to accomplish what hearing people could complete with a simple call. Deaf people asked children, neighbors, family, and friends to make calls or they drove long distances to have face-to-face conversation. When faced with an emergency, many deaf people had no way to contact police, fire, or ambulance services.

In 1964, Robert Weitbrecht, a deaf engineer, (PHOTO) developed a way to convert sounds into text and vice versa. Weitbrecht’s technical abilities, along with the financial, political, and marketing assistance of Andrew Saks and James Marsters, both also deaf, invented called a TTY, or teletypewriter. (PHOTO) How does a TTY work? By using a standard telephone handset placed on the TTY, the device transmitted and received information and translated it into a printed text. A flashing light connected to the TTY alerted the deaf person that the phone was ringing. By the mid 1980s, TTYs were in widespread use in the homes of deaf people and in many businesses and government agencies.

Prior to inventing the TTY, he was born deaf and was mainstreamed for the most part of his life. He went on to earn a B.S. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Astronomy from the University of Chicago. He was a contributing engineer to the Manhattan Project, a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. There, he developed the modern Geiger counter - a device for measuring radioactivity. For his efforts, he earned the United States Navy's Superior Accomplishment Award.

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