Special Supplement 1A: Can You Feel Me Now?
I found an interesting historical tidbit on the wires, I thought I’d share. I found a photograph from the archives of the National Photo Company Collection, now under the auspices of the Library of Congress, that was featured on the wonderful Shorpy photo blog.
The 1925 Gault Experiments for the Deaf
Depicted here is a 1925 experiment in speech that tried to train deaf children to “hear” words spoken to them via transmission of electrical vibrations to their finger tips. The experiment was carried out under the aegis of the National Resource Council in Washington, D.C the Kendall Green lab.
While today’s item is not as big or important as our usual T.W.T. spread, with regard to the larger speech narrative, I thought it might do for a special supplement. It illustrates a long held interest in using speech to help the disabled, pretty much from the very onset of record technology which had been around for just 60 years or so.
One can imagine that with the popular dissemination of recording technology that proliferated in the 1920s, all sorts of inventors and would-be tinkerers were inspired to do new things with the emerging technologies. One such person was R.H. Gault, a psychology professor at Northwestern University in the twenties and the man responsible for the experiment depicted in today’s entry.
According to a March 14, 1926 Washington Post article the folks down at Shorpy unearthed, “Prof. Gault [had] been working out [his finger tip vibration] idea for several years. His first apparatus was a speaking tube between two rooms, his subject a person of normal hearing. It was found that the subject could distinguish notes of high and low pitch when they were shrieked against his hand. The next step was to teach him the ‘feel’ of six different words, pronounced in a normal tone, in order. Then the words were spoken haphazard and the subject ‘felt’ them correctly.”
The article goes on, “The mechanism involved in these experiments is simple. The speaking tube, with which the work originated, has been replaced by a small electrical apparatus not unlike the telephone. The subject holds the receiver in his hand. Prof. Gault will continue his work here until October 1 and perhaps longer.”
The research was apparently significant. One of the Shorpies, God bless them, managed to find this report from 1995, “Processing of speech signals for physical and sensory disabilities.”
According to that report:
“The possibility of using vibration as a means of communication was explored by Gault and Knudsen. This early research focused on the use of single-channel devices without any preprocessing to take the characteristics of speech into account.
Single-channel tactile aids have since found a very useful practical application as alerting systems for deaf people. These devices fall under the category of nonspeech-specific tactile aids…”
Exciting no? The funny thing we keep finding in our There Was a Time series is that all of these speech applications that we think of as new and exciting often have roots that run back nearly a hundred years. Granted Gault’s experiment is no TTS computer interface, but it, and other experiments of its kind, probably paved the way for future developers to consider applying speech solutions to helping the disabled, if they didn’t contribute directly to the underlying tech.
As you may have read in your Ecclesiastes, Speech Heads, there is just nothing new under the sun.
