Speech Machine

Members of the American Otological Society, at their sixth annual convention in Manhattan last week, gave close examination to a machine that may make briefer the ten years now usually required to teach a person hard of hearing* to talk properly. The hard of hearing can easily imitate a normal person's talking lips, jaws and throat movements. But to imitate a talker's moving vocal cords requires tedious years of practice. Even after learning to talk properly the hard of hearing frequently forget to make their vocal cords work. Their lips move; they make no sound.

The machine shown in Manhattan was devised by J. W. Legg, inventor for Westinghouse Electric & Mfg. Co., and Dr. Max A. Goldstein, director of Central Institute for the Deaf, St. Louis. In principle it is like the oscillograph used in every high-school physics class for experiments on sound. Noises thrown against a diaphragm causes a light to throw a shadow against a screen. The same sound always causes the same shadow. The Legg-Goldstein machine is a highly efficient oscillograph.

In practice the talking teacher throws his voice into the machine; the hard of hearing pupil sees the sounds and images; experiments until he creates sounds that duplicate the images of the teacher's voice.

*The hard of hearing prefer this adjective phrase to "deaf," which has acquired connotations of scorn and taunt.