For me one of the joys of what I do is to be constantly surprised and challenged by the way people have invented gadgets for the genuine betterment of society. And while some of those ideas sadly disappear into obscurity far too quickly, their concepts can often live on through the work of others.
A short time ago I was helping someone sort through items from their deceased partners collection, when I came across a small machine part that strangely fascinated me. It was one of those things which appeared quite inconsequential on its own and would have been easily overlooked amid a box of stuff. But this item had been placed quite carefully on a shelf on its own by the previous owner. Despite wracking my brain all day about what this random thing could be part of, I must admit I was really none the wiser, until by chance I happened across a couple of sheets of photocopied paper about it. At once the item made tantalising sense, and for the sheer fun of learning I purchased this little contraption and took it home to research more fully.
The item I’d come across turned out to be the key component for a pretty much forgotten machine called the ‘Optophone’. Invented in 1913 by a man called Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe this amazing contraption was able to help blind people read regular printed books. Despite the mouthful of a name, Fournier d’Albe was a fascinating, eclectic and highly creative individual who was influential in the promotion and use of selenium as a light cell. Born in 1868 he was an Irish Physicist, Astrophysicist and Chemist who also dabbled in spiritualism, was jointly the first to translate an Irish text into Experanto, and experimented to improve both television and radio. Between 1910-1914 Fournier was Assistant Lecturer of Physics at Birmingham University in the UK where he excelled in the field of electromagnetism, and it was during this time that he also invented his Optophone.
The principle of his reading machine was ingenious to say the least and relied on the fact that a beam of light will reflect differently off light and dark surfaces. In his Optophone a fine beam of light would pass through a spinning circular disk with 5 rows of carefully spaced holes in it. This perforated disk would break the light beam into a unique ribbon (or code) of light. The 5-ribbon beam would then continue on until it hit a very small area on a regular page of a book, before being reflected back off to be collected and interpreted by a nearby Selenium cell. The conductivity of selenium varies depending on the degree of light that hits it, and Fourier d’Arbe realised that by scanning a printed alphabetical letter with a beam of light, the ratio of light to dark that would reflect back will vary for each of the 26 individual letters. By assigning a full musical note to the white space, then the varying light ratios for each letter in turn would create a slightly different tone to that note. Provided the blind listener was able to learn and discern the optophone’s varying tonal range, then in theory they could ‘read’ any ordinary printed book they liked, albeit one slow letter at a time.
Fournier d’Albe’s idea was clearly a monumental one, but only if he could get it to work efficiently enough and convince others to invest in it. While Braille was already in common use at the time (and had been around already for nearly 100 years) the number of braille books available was still extremely limited. For Fournier, the sudden emergence of the First World War in 1914 would ultimately prove both a help and a hinderance to his plan. In 1917 he recruited the help of an 18 year old blind girl called Mary Jameson who would become his primary test subject, and shortly afterwards successfully approached a reputable optical engineering firm in Glasgow named Barr & Stroud who agreed to refine and manufacture his invention. In many ways the spiritualist Fouriner d’Arbe must have felt the timing of his invention was somehow providence as wave after wave of permanently wounded soldiers were returning from France with the Government, public services and society struggling to rehabilitate them back into normal life.
Sadly, despite Fournier’s best attempts at finding support the Optophone never went into mass production and it is believed that Barr and Stroud only produced about 8 machines in total. Despite multiple demonstrations by the inventor and Mary Jameson (who by the early 1920s was up to a very impressive reading speed of 40 words per minute) they still could not quite convince the relevant government and hospital representatives that all the associated costs that came with using the machine would be worth it in the end. For as well as the anticipated £80 cost of purchasing the machine, teachers and staff would need to be fully trained in its use also. While Mary had become quite proficient with using the machine over the years, the sheer explosion of costs to the health service for helping these newly injured ex-servicemen meant the Optophone was too great a gamble to take at that time.
Fournier died in 1933 but his invention and idea would be repeatedly picked up and refined by others around the world during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. By the 1960s Fournier’s concept was at last reaching a far wider audience as computer scientists wrestled to create reliable optical mark recognition machines for use with big data processing and test marking.
In 1966 the now elderly Mary Jameson gave a short speech to a specialist conference offering her own view on the Optophone and its more recent competitors. Despite recognising the crudeness in certain elements of Fournier d’Albe’s original machine, she still had plenty of praise for it nearly 50 years on. While the Optophone was not able to change the live of every blind person, it clearly did change the life of Mary Jameson.
Photo attribution: Portrait of Fornier d’Arbe via Wikipedia ; Wounded WW1 Soldiers via Aussie~mobs ;