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The year was 1808, and Pelligrino Turri was in love. A passionate young Italian inventor, Turri had fallen hard for the beautiful Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. One hitch: The countess was blind. So, in hope of improving her illegible writing, Turri crafted a machine made of keys and metal arms tipped with raised characters. When the operator pushed a key, an arm struck a piece of carbon paper atop a sheet of paper. Preserved to this day, the countess' easy-to-read love letters remain the first practical demonstration of a working typewriter -- the technology that would dominate writing until the 1970s.
The end result of Turri's desire to help his blind lover was unforeseen -- but hardly unique. Many broad technological innovations have grown out of efforts to assist the disabled -- from the telephone to cable television and digital cameras. For companies and CEOs with the foresight to recognize their wider utility, such devices have reaped rich rewards.
You doubt it? Look at Microsoft Corp. Today the colossus of Redmond builds accessibility into all its software. That's no accident, just smart business. But alas, many big technology players continue to treat assistive technology as a research sidelight at best. All too often, such research is underfunded, or not done at all. Precise figures remain scant, but anecdotal evidence suggests assistive-technology gets a tiny percentage of the total dollars poured into consumer-technology research.
MR. BELL'S INVENTION. That's simply bad business, according to Jonathan Mart, 52, a Raleigh (N.C.) marketing consultant to information technology companies. "Accessibility to the IT field presents creative, financial and intellectual challenges to the leaders of the IT industry," he says. "If information-technology providers think unconventionally about how to apply these technologies in new and creative ways, I am convinced they can develop IT products that are accessible and useful to a billion more consumers." Still sound farfetched? Take a historical look at crucial discoveries spurred by assistive-technology research.
A teacher of deaf children and the lover of a deaf woman, inventor Alexander Graham Bell set out to build a device that would let the deaf hear. In 1874, he began experimenting with a crude machine called the phonoautograph that he constructed around an ear taken from a cadaver. When Bell spoke, the ear's intact membrane vibrated and turned an attached lever that etched sine-curve speech patterns on a slate of smoked glass, just like the needles on a modern polygraph.
That set Bell thinking that it might be possible to vary the intensity of an electrical current in response to the spoken word. This is the same scientific lynchpin that even today allows us to transmit speech over wires. Telecommunications has changed the way people live -- as well as generating hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenues.
BIRTH OF SONY. Help for the deaf also spurred the invention of the transistor in 1948 when Bell Labs engineers attempted to improve hearing-aid technology. While the transistor would lead to compact and powerful hearing aids, two young Japanese engineers glimpsed a much bigger future for the small devices that efficiently manipulated electrical current.
In 1953, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita licensed the transistor technology from AT&T subsidiary Western Digital for the then princely sum of $25,000. The duo's Sony Corp. was soon turning out pocket-size transistor radios, the first step on the road that led the company to become the planet's largest producer of consumer electronics. Today, modern versions of the transistor play a key role in cable TV, wireless phones, fax machines, laptop computers and touch-screen technology, to name just a few applications.
In 1974, Cambridge (Mass.) inventor Ray Kurzweil was working to improve the process by which a computer recognizes different type fonts. On a plane ride, he sat next to a blind man who gave him the idea of combining character-recognition technology with a speech synthesizer. The marriage would create a device that converted text to speech and enhanced the lives of the visually impaired. Along the way, Kurzweil pioneered the use of charged coupled device chips, which soak up images and translate them into digital information. CCD chips are now the backbone of the digital cameras, and the speech-synthesizer technology Kurzweil pioneered forms the backbone of text-to-speech software, such as that sold by Lernout & Hauspie. All told, speech synthesizers and CCD chips have produced billions of dollars.
CAPTION OPTIONS. Even with such evidence, companies sometimes have to be dragged kicking and screaming before they embrace assistive technologies. In the 1970s, TV networks loudly protested closed-caption decoders for the hearing-impaired, claiming the extra cost would kill their industry. Then Congress and the Federal Communications Commission mandated closed-captioned TV. Today's television execs owe lawmakers and regulators a debt of gratitude because captioning enables viewers to retrieve video content by key word through multimedia databases. And captioned televisions also allow people to watch programs in noisy environments such as sports bars and gyms. That means millions of additional televisions get sold each year.
Even the Internet, which is spurring productivity and IT sales around the world, can trace of its most powerful features to the needs of the disabled. In 1972, Vinton Cerf was one of two key architects of the Defense Dept.'s ARPANET computer network, the first version of the Internet. Now a senior vice-president at WorldCom, Cerf saw the power of e-mail -- in part because his own hearing had been impaired since birth.
"I have spent, as you can imagine, a fair chunk of my time trying to persuade people with hearing impairments to make use of electronic mail because I found it so powerful myself," Cerf says. Now, with billions of e-mails zipping around the globe, many consider e-mail the Internet's premier application.
To be sure, not all assistive-technology research pays off. History is littered with dozens of wacky devices that never caught on. But the bottom line is clear: Assistive-technology research is a big winner over the long term. Technology companies should recognize this fact and take the lead with better funding -- funding that may well lead to bigger profits.
Williams offers his views every week for BW Online. Got a comment or question? Write to him at JMMAW@aol.com Edited by Alex Salkever
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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