Medicine: Teletactor

In the pit of a grey-walled amphitheatre on Northwestern University’s McKinlock (downtown Chicago) Campus last week a short, stocky, professor with a twinkle in his eye told how the deaf may hear through their fingers by means of an invention he had perfected. The profes- sor: Dr. Robert Harvey Gault, 57, for 22 years professor of psychology at Northwestern. The invention: the Gault Teletactor.

Eight years ago Dr. Gault began pondering the sensitiveness of man’s hands & fingers. After experimenting with an ordinary acousticon, he found that it was possible to discern the difference between vowels and consonants. He got a four-year leave of absence from Northwestern so that he could continue experimentations in Washington.

Not new last week was Dr. Gault’s Teletactor. An imperfect one was in use for several years at a school for the blind in Chicago. But three weeks ago Dr. Gault completed his new Teletactor, an entirely rebuilt instrument which has greater power, greater sensitivity.

In principle, the Teletactor is very much like a combination of the telephone and the radio. The speaker talks into a microphone. By wires the voice is transmitted to the receiver, much more powerful and sensitive than the telephone receiver, topped by an aluminum plate, which vibrates with each tone of the voice. On this plate the deaf places his fingers, feels the sound of the voice.

Dr. Gault admitted that his instrument is not now intended to take the place of lip-reading—probably, he said, it never will. Says he: “For every 100 words that are recognized by the method of lipreading alone, 120 are recognized in what I call lip-touch-reading or in the condition of dual stimulation.”

Dr. Gault’s objective: to perfect a Teletactor small and compact that may, some day, be carried on the person.