Page Turner: Mary Jameson and the Optophone

Daina Bouquin 0:48

It is nineteen eighteen, and Mary Jameson is reading. She was born blind, and she usually reads braille. But the page in front of her is an ordinary printed page. Black ink on white paper. There is a machine between her and the page. A delicate arrangement of lenses and wires, a spinning disc and a small piece of an element called Selenium. As the mechanism moves slowly across the print, the machine sends a collection of musical notes into a pair of telephone receivers. And Mary listens. She hears in the sounds one letter, then another. Eventually, a word. It is slow work. And the machine is temperamental. Its focusing mechanism is so delicate that someone walking heavily across the room can knock it out of alignment. But Mary has been practicing. By the summer of 1918, she can read about one word per minute. And that is enough to prove that it is possible. I'm Daina Bouquin and this is Found in the Machine. In June 1912, a physicist named Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe arrives at an optical convention in London with an invention. Fournier d'Albe is an unusual man. A scientist and writer with interests ranging from electricity to spiritualism. He knows some of the most prominent thinkers of the age. He has befriended Harry Houdini. And he has spent years studying the properties of a chemical element called selenium. Selenium does something peculiar. In darkness, it resists the passage of electricity. But if you shine a light on it, that resistance changes. Alexander Graham Bell had used it in an instrument that transmitted sound on a beam of light. And in Poland, an ophthalmologist named Kazimierz Noiszewski had used it as an artificial eye to help blind people tell light from darkness. And Fournier d'Albe is working on a very similar idea. His instrument is housed in a slender wooden box. Inside is a selenium cell that responds to light, producing changes in an electrical signal that a person can hear through telephone receivers. Point it toward a window and the sound changes. Move it toward a corner and it changes again. He calls it the exploring optophone, and he imagines it helping blind people navigate the world. The newspapers are delighted. But among the people who learn about the invention is a blind solicitor named Washington Ranger. Ranger writes to Fournier d'Albe. What concerns him is how a blind person might earn a living. A person who can detect a window has learned something about a room. But a person who can read an ordinary printed page has access to an enormous part of the working world. Letters, newspapers, documents, books. So Fournier d'Albe begins working on another machine. By 1913, he has an experimental reading optophone. The First World War interrupts his work, but he returns to it, building an instrument that turns the shapes of printed letters into sounds. To understand how this machine works, imagine a capital T. One upright line topped with a horizontal stroke. Now imagine a tiny vertical row of lights moving slowly across that letter from left to right. Each of the little lights flickers at a different rate, corresponding to a different musical note. The flickering comes from a spinning disc pierced with holes laid out in concentric rings passing in front of a lamp. When the light falls on white paper, it reflects back toward a selenium cell. And the listener hears a chord. All of the notes are on. But black ink reflects much less light. So when the light passes over the ink, some notes disappear. So as the row of lights moves across the T, the beginning of the top stroke interrupts a note. Then the vertical line interrupts the whole chord. The light continues past the vertical line with only the top stroke continuing to interrupt one note. A person listening through the device has to recognize the letter T by the notes that disappear. It's reading by absence. In the spring of 1917, Fournier d'Albe demonstrates the instrument to representatives of the National Institute for the Blind. He manages to read an unfamiliar newspaper passage, but the demonstration does little to convince them. This machine is slow. It takes extensive training, and its practical usefulness remains uncertain. And these are reasonable objections. But Fournier d'Albe keeps looking for people willing to learn. That year he meets 18-year-old Mary Jameson and her twin sister Margaret. The sisters already know Braille, and now they begin learning the strange new system of sounds. And Mary takes to it. Not immediately. There is nothing immediate about learning the optophone. She must memorize the musical patterns of printed letters. She must distinguish sounds that can be maddeningly similar. And she has to manage the machine itself. Page must be positioned correctly, and the mechanism must be focused. The scanner must be moving at the right speed. Too quickly and the letters become an unintelligible stream. But too slowly and she loses track of what came before. But she practices. And by August 1918, she gives a demonstration at King's College in London. Someone in the audience has connections to Barr and Stroud, a Scottish company known for precision optical instruments. And the company agrees to build a more practical optophone. The machine is sturdier with a curved glass surface on which a book can rest. Its scanning mechanism moves more reliably across the page. And its designers add a second Selenium cell so the machine can sound the black ink itself. Now, instead of listening for the notes that disappear, Mary can listen for the notes that are there. But the signals are faint. And after an hour or two, the selenium cells begin crackling. In June 1920, Fournier d'Albe announces in the journal Nature that the problem of opening the world's literature to blind readers has been solved. It is a remarkable claim and entirely premature. The Optophone is expensive. It remains difficult to operate, and it demands an enormous investment of time. Mary knows this better than anyone. By now she is its most accomplished reader. She travels to demonstrations and exhibitions, showing audiences what the machine can do. And she is also helping to design it. At Bar and Stroud's London branch, she works with an engineer named A. M. Lundie. She suggests changes to the musical notes so that certain letters are easier to tell apart. She asks for stronger signals to hear over the noise of the mechanism itself. She works with Lundie on a device that moves between lines and on a feature for reading italic type. She teaches other blind people how to use it. And her speed keeps climbing. From one word per minute to 25, then 40, then 60. She is doing the labor of a developer and a public ambassador, but she is doing it informally. So her father, Thomas Jameson, writes to Barr and Stroud. He wants the company to recognize her vital work with proper compensation and a formal place. Barr and Stroud pays Mary for individual demonstrations, but never gives her regular employment. Still, she keeps working. And in 1921, Mary sits down to read a novel. It is The Warden by Anthony Trollope. Published in 1855, it tells the story of a kindly clergyman caught in a dispute over money at a charitable institution. Mary places the book on the Optophone. She finds the first line and she begins to read. She no longer labors over individual sounds. Familiar patterns begin to come together. And she starts to notice something. The more she reads a particular author, the easier it becomes to anticipate what comes next. A writer has habits, certain turns of phrase. But when she begins a book by someone new, the work becomes harder again. So she deliberately decides to read writers who differ widely in style. She reads Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, an autobiography by Herman Charles Merivale, and others. And she finishes The Warden. But even as Mary becomes more proficient, the future of the Optophone is becoming less certain. Most people who try it never approach her speed, and few schools can afford one. Braille is already established, reliable, and widely taught. By 1922, Barr and Stroud is doubting whether there will ever be enough customers. By 1928, the company has stopped pushing the machines. Fournier d'Albe dies in 1933. Only a small number of Optophones have been sold. But Mary Jameson keeps reading. In 1944, the organization St. Dunstan's takes up the British Optophone and replaces the old selenium cells with photoelectric cells that are much louder. In the 1950s, a man named W. K. Hill improves the focusing, making it easier to tell similar letters apart. Mary tests the changes. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, engineers at RCA are building a machine that tries to identify the printed characters itself. The effort is led in part by Vladimir Zworykin, a man who had examined Fournier d'Albe's Optophones decades earlier. RCA's work is an early step toward what we now call optical character recognition. The task of deciphering the page is beginning to move from the person into the machine. It is 1966. Nearly 50 years have passed since Mary first sat down with the Optophone. She records a presentation for a conference on reading machines in the United States. She remembers the delicate early machine. But most of her talk concerns the machines being built now. She's still asking questions to improve listening devices. She wonders which notes are easier to distinguish and which letters are harder to recognize. In the years that follow Mary's presentation, she exchanges letters and tape recordings with blind Americans working on newer machines. One of them, Harvey Lauer of the United States Veterans Administration, sends her a device called a visotoner. It's smaller and more portable than her old Optophone, but it is hard to keep aligned with the text and it struggles with certain colors of ink. She weighs the two machines. She knows what she likes about her old one and she knows what she wishes it could do. She knows what it already does.

Mary Jameson (archival audio) 15:43

The Optophone is as much a part of my everyday life as the typewriter or telephone. Sometimes the print is too big for the Optophone array. At others, italics are too sloping. While noting the shortcomings of the Optophone, I can use the valuable facilities it already gives. I hope this situation makes me of use in solving vital print reading problems which remain.

Daina Bouquin 16:16

Mary Jameson passes away in 1980. By then the Optophone belongs to an earlier age. Computers will soon recognize printed letters on their own and read them out loud. But there is a photograph of Mary, taken decades earlier. She is seated at an Optophone reading The Warden. She wears a pair of telephone receivers over her ears. The book rests on the machine in front of her. Somewhere inside a disc is spinning and light is falling across the printed page. And the machine is making its little collection of sounds. Mary knows what they say. I 'm Daina Bouquin and this is Found in the Machine. If you enjoy my stories, consider passing them along or leaving a rating or a review wherever you listen. And if you'd like to support the show, you can go to found in the machine.com/ support, and you can find our Patreon and other ways to support the show. The most recent bonus episode received by Patreon members was about the twenty thirty-eight problem. Thanks for listening, guys.