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 The speaking tube, with which the work originated, has been replaced by a small electrical apparatus not unlike the telephone.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.
This installment of our ongoing series in the history of speech is sure to bring nostalgic remembrances to all you Speech Heads born in the late 70s to early 80s. Just a little more than thirty years ago, Texas Instruments brought us an important development would change many a childhood. No. I’m not talking about the TI-89 calculator with your copy of “Drugwars” surreptitiously installed so you could slack off in the back of pre-calculus. I’m talking about the Speak & Spell.
Speak & Spell
I can see some speech-eyes rolling. “Really, Eric?” you’re asking, but hear me out. Despite it’s humble size, The Speak & Spell played an important role in Speech History. It was one of the first highly accurate and widely available text-to-speech products—really one of the first practical applications of speech synthesis for a consumer market.
The toy was a direct outgrowth of Texas Instrument’s bizarre 1970s experiments in speech synthesis. The world had just seen man create the tech required to reproduce human speech with tuned voices stored on ROMs. Seeing the potential of those speech fruits, Paul Breedlove, a TI engineer, began development of the Speak & Spell in 1976 with a paltry $25,000 budget. Yes, even then it seems that the world callously and stupidly turned a cold shoulder to speech. Breedlove, however, would be vindicated. Within two short years, the Speak & Spell was flying off the 1978 shelves.
Breedlove’s completed proof incorporated TI’s trademarked Solid State Speech technology, which stored full words in solid state the way calculators of those halcyon 1970s days stored numbers. The Speak & Spell even had a slot for “expansion module” cartridges, which could be inserted to beef up the onboard vocabulary. O’ the foresight of those Texas men! You can see the very same principles at work at today’s speech solutions, like with Nuance and their specific expansion vocabularies for radiology, or orthopedics, or (hopefully in the future) trucking—Nuance, if you’re reading this, I know that there’s at least one boy who’d like to see a CB trucker vocabulary for his Dragon Naturally Speaking rig next Christmas.
The Speak & Spell had its limitations though; limitations that in many ways highlighted some of the persistent problems of building vocabularies that have dogged us in speech.
In my own bucolic childhood, my friends and I would use the old S&S to try and spell dirty words we had found in the dictionary. I’m sure some of you Speech Heads out there did the same, only to find, with the same disappointing results my brother Adam B. and I saw, that words like “wiener” and “scuzzbucket” were not included in the machine’s rather limited vocabulary. Come to think of it, you couldn’t even find the latter term in the limited vocabulary of a late 80s dictionary, either.
Still, the Speak & Spell had great staying power. The machine was produced for nearly twenty years and saw many improvements over its 1978-1992 run. Its vacuum florescent display was replaced with liquid crystal, it was given a membrane keyboard (which in turn was changed from ABC to standard QWERTY layout), and it saw several releases in different languages.
Special fun fact about the different languages: there’s no regional lockout on the expansions, so you can plug a German cartridge into your English Speak & Spell and confuse the b’jeepers out of your friends.
More important than its technological significance though, is its impact on our cultural memory. The Speak & Spell, perhaps more than any other speech solution, has made its way into popular discourse. Various works of art make reference to it. Kraftwerk sampled it in their seminal work Computer World, E.T. famously used one to phone home, there’s one in Toy Story, Chucky played with one in Bride of Chucky, and Dane Cook (who isn’t funny at all) apparently has a shtick about it on his album Harmful if Swallowed. And these are just a few. A lot of musicians use modified Speak & Spells with bent circuts as instruments.
All this talk is probably getting you Speech Heads worked up into a heat. You’re probably just itching to visit mom and dad, and spend six hours trying to fish your old Speak & Spell from your childhood closet. You don’t have to, though. There are a bunch of emulators on the Internet for you to play with without having to suffer one of your father’s fishing stories or your mother’s constant criticism about your hygiene.
While scouring the web for news in the latest speech technology happenings, I stumbled on one of the oldest speech technology happenings. In a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the Dictaphone and Ediphone, I’ve found an advertisement film for the Ediphone on YouTube. The film is just about 100 years old, and gives us a lot of great views of the oldest on-premise speech solution in action.
The film begins in a woe-betided office inundated with reams of shorthand dictation, all of which must be transcribed by a young secretary. As the day wears on and frustration mounts, she suffers from a nervous breakdown. She must work well beyond five o’clock. There is just so much dictation! Surely there must be a better way!
Enter the Edison salesman. The Edison man shows off the Ediphone, which instantly increases productivity. So much so that our young secretary thankfully and lovingly strokes her machine.
The coolest thing about the advertisement is you get to see all the early speech tech in action. The entire Ediphone solution came with three machines: the Ediphone, which recorded and played back dictation; the shaver, which shaved down used cylinders so that they could be reused (each one could be shaved and reused 100 times); and a duplicator which could duplicate cylinders.
Only the Ediphone and shaver are shown in this short, but you get to see them operating in real time, giving you a feel for how they were actually used.
Speech heads, you may have noticed my news posting yesterday about the centennial of Dictaphone, one of the world’s first mass-produced personal recording devices. Well, the copious research that I did for that article got me to thinking about the industry. Boy we’ve come far we’ve come since Dictaphone first scratched out huffy voices onto their patented celluloid cylinders. Today’s IVVR car-shopping avatars and user-slapping Japanese robots seem to be a far cry from gramophones and 78s of yesteryear.
Still, without those first toddling steps, we’d never even have our modern talking urinal cakes and automated call centers. So here, I’d like to inaugurate a new recurring blog feature that takes look back over the last 100 years of speech, and traces some of those early, toddling babysteps, dear readers.
Today’s installment takes a look back at the very first widely used on-premise speech solutions: the Dictaphone and Ediphone.
Dictaphone & Ediphone
The Dictaphone and Ediphone were dictation machines that cut sound into hard celluloid cylinders. Popularized in the early twentieth century, they allowed recordings to be made and played back for later transcription and archival purposes.
By the time the D & E had come into existence, the world was getting pretty familiar with recording technology. Talking machines like the gramophone and phonograph had been commercially available since the 1890s, and commercial recordings were beginning to be made in increasing numbers. Not just music, either.
Laterals or cylinder recordings of every kind were being made. A popular one from 1906, “The Destruction of San Francisco,” featured a dramatic reenactment of the earthquake in San Francisco. The two minute recording begins with a flush of music and an announcer crying, “It’s an earthquake! Run for your lives! To the park! To the park!”
Terror’ed wails and sounds of panicked men and women follow, until the announcer calls for the good people of San Fran to bring out their dead and the horrible scene gives way to second thrush of music that closes out the drama.
Music, of course, was popular too, with the many of the illustrious opera stars of the early 20th, like Enrico Caruso, committing their vibratos to wax for posterity. You can catch some of these laterals for yourself in Archive.org’s wonderful playground of sound. I’m particularly fond of “Red Hot Henry Brown,” a humorous ditty about one man’s predicaments with fire. As you’ll find wandering around the archive, most early commercially available recordings were of music. No different that today, really.
Now that’s all fine and well for amusement and diversion, but you’re an Industry Speech Head. What do you care for a bunch of entertainment ballyhoo? Consider this though, the rise of the recorded cylinder set in place the apparatus that would allow the dictation machine to take hold, and it was the dictation machine in turn that brought recorded sound into the workplace and ushered in the era of the speech solution.
In this early arena, Dictaphone was the more mind shared solution. It had such wide recognition that all dictation machines, including the Ediphone, were called “dictaphones” by the thankless and unwashed masses who bought them. O’ that rankled old T.A. Edison!
Still, the Ediphone did a pretty good turn of business and more or less split the dictation market for much of the 1910s and 20s. The Ediphone was certainly the more stylish of the two machines with its 4-minute playing bright cobalt blue Amberol wax cylinders. The look of the Amberol remains one of the defining features of Edison laternals.
Wax technology improved on as the years rolled by with longer playing cylinders reaching ten-minute lengths. The dictation industry breathed life into the dying wax cylinder medium. In the ‘teens the cylinder being overtaken in commercial sales by the cheaply produced, easily shipped, and easily stored record discs. Dictation, however, kept the cylinders it spinning.
In fact, the cylinder was so durable as a dictation medium that into the 1950s it was not uncommon to find a Dictophone still cutting spools in offices across America. Actually, as an analog medium, the cylinder is even more durable than any of its successors. A single cylinder is capable of sustaining hundreds of playbacks with only minimal loss of quality.
More important than their technological legacy however, the Dictaphone and the Ediphone pioneered the business speech solution we all enjoy so well today. From out of these early beginnings evolved the tech and market for voice recognition, voice capture, and just about every other speech function you can think of. Without the dictaphones, enterprises might have blithely and ignorantly gone along their way without a single speech solution deployment. What a savage world that might have been.
So, to Dictophone and Ediphone of the early 20th Century, Speech Tech Blog salutes you!
Eric B. —
February 2, 2009 @ 6:22 pm 
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.
This installment of our ongoing series in the history of speech is sure to bring nostalgic remembrances to all you Speech Heads born in the late 70s to early 80s. Just a little more than thirty years ago, Texas Instruments brought us an important development would change many a childhood. No. I’m not talking about the 
In my own bucolic childhood, my friends and I would use the old S&S to try and spell dirty words we had found in the dictionary. I’m sure some of you Speech Heads out there did the same, only to find, with the same disappointing results my brother 
More important than its technological significance though, is its impact on our cultural memory. The Speak & Spell, perhaps more than any other speech solution, has made its way into popular discourse. Various works of art make reference to it. 
Speech heads, you may have noticed my 
By the time the D & E had come into existence, the world was getting pretty familiar with recording technology. Talking machines like the gramophone and phonograph had been commercially available since the 1890s, and commercial recordings were beginning to be made in increasing numbers. Not just music, either.
Still, the Ediphone did a pretty good turn of business and more or less split the dictation market for much of the 1910s and 20s. The Ediphone was certainly the more stylish of the two machines with its 4-minute playing bright cobalt blue Amberol wax cylinders. The look of the Amberol remains one of the defining features of Edison laternals.