Well it's blogging time again, and today, Im looking at a unique device that was far ahead of its time, creating a modern commodity before its concept was even conceptualized, and that device is this:
This is the VIP Communicator. It was introduced in 1978 and could quite possibly be the first mass market consumer handheld device that could send text based messages over a phone line. while text messaging is a common everyday practice today, the idea of doing something like that in the late 1970s was almost impossible without other expensive equipment. The only other devices that could do something like this would have been a Personal Computer with a modem, or a Telex machine and those were limited to hobbyists, businesses, universities and government agencies. So a device like this is certainly forward thinking considering the time it came out!
However, despite the similarities to modern text messaging, this device wasn't designed as a communication device for the average telephone user. No, it was actually designed as a communication device for the deaf, as its an ealy consumer version of a Telecommunications device for the deaf (Or TDD for short). The idea is that the user would type a message on a keyboard and the device would translate it into a special code that would be interpreted on the other line.
So what's the story behind this device, and how does it work? To tell this tale we need to go back to 1964, in San Francisco, California, the workplace of a unique physicist named Dr. Robert Weitbrecht.
Born in Orange, California on April 11, 1920, He was born deaf and learned to read lips from his mother at a young age. Despite his disability, he managed to do very well academically, earning a B.S. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1942 and finishing his formal education with a M.S. in Astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1957. He was also an accomplished physicist, working at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), then an electronics scientist at the U.S. Naval Air Missile Test Center, where he would be involved with The Manhattan Project and helping invent the atomic bomb.
However despite his accomplishments, there was one unusual field he was always interested in, Ametur Radio. In 1936, Weitbrecht passed his FCC exam for an amateur license at the young age of 16. Ever since then, he had been fond of using radio and Morse Code for communication as he could actually feel the vibrations used in Morse Code.
In 1950, he expanded further into the field by purchasing a Radioteletype system, so he could receive messages over the radio.
The concept of the Radioteletype dates back to 1849, when the first teleprinters were designed and Landline teleprinter operations began in a circuit that was put in service between Philadelphia and New York City. In 1874, French Telegraph engineer Émile Baudot designed a system using a five unit code, which later became known as Baudot code and was the standard operational code used in teleprinters.
By the 1920's, The US Department of the Navy began experimenting with teleprinter communications over radio and conducted the first successfully tested printing telegraphy between an airplane and ground radio station in August 1922. Later that year, the RCA successfully tested printing telegraphy via their Chatham, MA radio station to the RMS Majestic. Commercial Radioteletype (or RTTY) systems became active in the 1930s, and The US Military started to use radioteletype in the 1930s and expanded this usage for communication with allies during World War II.
The problem with this technology was that it required a radio to use which put it out of reach for non ametur radio opperators. In 1963, Weitbrecht was working at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, when he met James C. Marsters, a dentist and private airplane pilot who became deaf as an infant from scarlet fever.
Marsters approached Weitbrecht and proposed the idea of adapting the RTTY system to work with a standard telephone. Weitbrecht was interested in the idea, and soon modified his Radioteletype system to work on a standard phone line and the two made their first successful transmission one year later in 1964, with the transmission of the message: "Are you printing me now? Let's quit for now and gloat over the success.". After the test, the two teamed up with Andrew Saks, a deaf electrical engineer and grandson of the founder of the Saks Fifth Avenue department store chain, and founded Applied Communications Corp. (or APCOM). The company's first product was the PhoneType, a device based on Weitbrecht and Marsters telephone based RTTY technology, and is considered to be the first acoustic coupler modem.
APCOM collected old teleprinter machines from the Department of Defense and junkyards, attached PhoneTypes to the teleprinters enabling the AT&T standard Model 500 telephone to couple (or fit), into the rubber cups on the coupler, thus allowing the device to transmit and receive a unique sequence of tones generated by the different corresponding keys. The mechanism for teleprinters communications was accomplished electro-mechanically through frequency-shift keying (FSK) allowing only half-duplex communication, where only one person at a time can transmit. The entire configuration of teleprinter machine, acoustic coupler, and telephone set became known as the TeleTypewriter (or TTY).
A few years later in 1967, Paul Taylor, Another deaf electrical engineer, combined Western Union Teletype machines with modems to create his own TTYs, and distributed them to the homes of many in the deaf community in St. Louis, Missouri.
With the help of his friends Eugene McDowell, Frederick Stewart, Ralph McLaughlin, and Thomas Schwarz, he worked on a local telephone wake-up service which eventually became the first national local telephone relay system for the deaf.
Then in 1970, Engineer Michael Cannon began work on his own TDD, the first portable unit with a teleprinter and modem all in one.
The inspiration came to him one afternoon while visiting his friend K. Patrick "Kit" Corson having a discussion over a pizza at his apartment in Oakland, California. Cannon was lamenting to Kit how fed up he was with his work at his company, Micron Industries, and being creative for the sole purpose of making money for a decent living and wanted find something to do that would helpful to people. Corson replied by saying "Did you know that deaf people can't use the telephone?"
With this revelation, Cannon began to design his own TDD. what set his unit apart from earlier TDDs was its size. He wanted a device that a user could take anywhere, And after getting a hold of an early LED based Pocket Calculator from a local Montgomery Ward department store, he decided to use an LED display to help shrink the technology into a reasonably small size.
After 4 more years of development, Micron Industries launched the Micron MCM (Or Manual Communications Module) in 1974. The device was quite small at 10 x 8.25 x 3 inches, and ran off batteries, allowing it to be used at home on a home phone, or in public on a payphone.
The problem with all these devices were that they typically costed between $650 and $1000, making them a luxury item that very few could afford. Enter Robert Engelke, an electrical engineer designing devices to help people with communication disorders.
Through his friend Herb Pickell, a prominent member of the Wisconsin deaf community, Engelke became interested in improving text communications for individuals who are deaf. Working out of his basement, Engelke developed a low-cost TTY that people could use more easily and was even more portable than the MCM. In 1978, he formed Automated Data Systems Inc. and the company's first TDD was the V.I.P. Communicator. Being about the size of a pocket calculator, and in fact looking like a pocket scientific calculator with a small plastic acoustic coupler modem attached, it was smaller than the MCM and similar devices while still being large enough to comfortably use at home and in public and could even be clipped onto a shirt to show the words you were typing to an onlooker!
The device became a decent sales success, and the company began producing new models, (Though these units were more similar in design to the MCM rather than the handheld design of the VIP Communicator.) and eventually changed their name to Ultratec, who still make TDD devices today.
However despite all this, It still isn't true text messaging and back then no one outside of the deaf community was going to buy a VIP communicator just so they could send messages over a phone to their buddies to go dancing at a local discotheque in 1978. The actual story of text messaging begins in 1984 Friedhelm Hillebrand, a German telecommunications engineer, conceptualised SMS while working for Deutsche Telekom. Sitting at a typewriter at home, Hillebrand typed out random sentences and counted every letter, number, punctuation mark, and space. Almost every time, the messages contained fewer than 160 characters, thus giving the basis for the limit one could type via text messaging.
With Bernard Ghillebaert of France Télécom, he developed a proposal for the GSM (Groupe Spécial Mobile) meeting in February 1985 in Oslo Norway. with the first SMS Message being sent on 3 December 1992, at the Three Tuns Public House in Reading, Berkshire, England when 22-year-old test engineer Neil Papworth, working for Sema Group in the UK (now Airwide Solutions), used a PC to send the text message "Merry Christmas" via the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis, who was at a party in Newbury, Berkshire, which had been organized to celebrate the event.
Around the same time, the technology was put on the market. The first company to use the technology in a cell phone was Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia, Who launched the first phone with SMS (The Nokia 1011) was first released on November 10, 1992
However there may still be a connection with the two technologies. Supposedly in 1994, a college student-worker named Joseph Alan Poirier, recommended using the system to send texts to forklifts to improve delivery of parts to the assembly line at GM Powertrain in Toledo, Ohio, and sending a text to pagers. He recommended taking pagers to alphanumeric displays incorporating the same system in discussions with the pager supplier for Outback Steakhouse and having relays put in the forklifts to ping alert messages to the pagers used in that system. He called it text messaging, coining the phrase. It is theorized that when Toyota forklift was allegedly hired by GM for this work, one of the subcontractors, Kyocera, utilized the work for the Toyota forklift company to create text messaging for cell phones. Whether this story is true or not is unknown but it is certainly possible.
Either way it just goes to show that when it comes to inventions and technology, sometimes ideas have a weird way of reinventing themselves. From a technology that was developed to help the deaf communicate over the phone in the 1960's, to a similar technology developed decades later in the 1990's that's become an integral part of our lives, Ideas can come intentionally or unintentionally. While TDD devices aren't as prevalent as they once were being replaced by the technologies that it helped innovate, devices like the VIP Comunicator are a reminder of our desire to connect with each other, and the dedicated disabled engineers that didn't stop their desire to reach out and touch someone. Thanks for reading! see you next time!
