optophone

A brief history of devices Has the optophone got a future?

The modern Optophone works by scanning an image directly from a video camera.

This first Optophone was intended as a mobility aid for blind people.

This group turned "sour" on the Optophone approach after concluding that reading would be too slow.

The optophone used a vertical row of five spots of light.

Later models of the Optophone allowed speeds of up to 60 words per minute, though only some subjects are able to achieve this rate.

It was here that he set up a laboratory to look into the properties of selenium and where the word optophone was first coined in 1912.

The only one of these that was competitive to the Optacon development was the Stereotoner, basically an improved optophone.

The optophone is a device, used by the blind, that scans text and generates time-varying chords of tones to identify letters.

'Tis optophone which ontophanes.

Amazingly, in 1913 a reading machine for the blind, called the optophone, was built by Fournier d'Albe in England.

Fournier d'Albe was the inventor of the optophone and worked as an assistant to the physicist Oliver Lodge.

Despite the fact that most people haven't heard of an Optophone, the idea has been around for nearly 100 years and the first working device was built as long ago as 1912.

The Battelle Institute was provided with funding to develop an improved Optophone and Haskins Laboratories was funded to conduct research toward a synthetic speech reading machine.

Concurrently, Edmund Fournier d'Albe developed the Optophone, a handheld scanner that when moved across a printed page, produced tones that corresponded to specific letters or characters.

As well as his recitals of sound poems, he also presented a manifesto describing a machine "capable of converting audio and visual signals interchangeably, that he later called the Optophone".

In 1913, Dr. Edmund Fournier d'Albe of University of Birmingham invented the optophone, which used selenium photosensors to detect black print and convert it into an audible output.

The optophone played a set group of notes: g c' d' e' g' b' c. Each note corresponded with a position on the optophone's reading area, and that note was silenced if black ink was sensed.