READING BY SOUND.

Taihape Daily Times, 28 December 1918, Page 5

READING BY SOUND.

•L REMARKABLE INVENTION FOR THE BLIND.

Dr. E. E. Bournir d'Albe recently demonstrated at the British Scientific Products Exhibition at King's London, it wonderful invention of his own, which r enables blind persons to be independent of Braille type, and to read any book or newspaper. By means of the optophone, as the machine is called, intermittent light dots of five different frequencies flash several hundred times per second on thebook or paper, and the reflected light is received on a selenium tablet, which translates the small variations of light from the print into sound, and the blind person is able r.o,rei.ognise by the sounds the shape of the individual letters, very high resistance telephones aeiug used. This was the first occasion on which the completed machine was publicly

shdwri. Miss Mary Jameso*;, of South Norwood, the !ir«t blind person to acquire the art of reading by this means through the ear, read a. test nassago to demohitrace the Utv.'ity of the machine. Mr d'Albe gave an account of some of the new methods adopted in Great Britain for.the manufacture of selenium cells, an industry which before the war had been almost non-existent in that country, whereas it was highly developed in Germany. The cells now being pro* duced here are the best of their kinTi, <ind this production had led to a number of new applications of selenium. The distinctive property of selenium, the doctor said, is that it responds to light by becoming more conducting; when illuminated. It translates, so to speak, light into electricity, and so enables us to make light perform certain things which otherwise would only be done by switching on a curvent. As an illustration he exhibited

i working model of a lighthouse, which lights up automatically i'i\ the dark and extinguishes itself with the dawn of day.