Listen to Bliss Interview, Part 1
Legends and Pioneers of Blindness Assistive Technology
Silicon Valley, CA
May 1, 2002
Introduction to Interview with Jim Bliss
Tony Candela: Jim Bliss is the first to be interviewed for the series, "Legends and Pioneers of Blindness Assistive Technology." Along with his senior partner, John Linvill, Jim began the modern blindness assistive technology era. Together, their invention of the Optacon kicked off a series of technological developments that brought blind people from the 19th century into the latter 20th century.
Jim went on to head Telesensory Systems, Inc., later called Telesensory, and, after leaving there, formed his own company, which he still runs, J. Bliss Imaging Systems.
I met Jim in his home in the Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, in 2002. We sat surrounded by articles and other memorabilia which he collected to spur his memory as we talked about the long history of assistive technology for blind people that began for Jim in the 1960s and continues on into the 2000s.
Jim is one of several engineers graduating from MIT who entered the blindness assistive technology industry. Here is my interview with Jim Bliss.
Beginning of Interview
Tony Candela: We are at the home of Jim Bliss from J. Bliss Imaging Systems. It's May 1, 2002 and I am Tony Candela.
Well, first, again, thanks for doing this with me. You are one of a series of folks who I am calling legends of the blindness assistive technology business who we are doing interviews with.
Just to break the ice, tell us a bit about what you're doing now. You've been in this business a long time. What are you doing now?
Jim Bliss: Well, first I'd like to say that I don't necessarily consider myself a legend. I just happen to be an ordinary guy at a certain place in time and a certain location that things happen to. What I'm doing right now is I have an extremely small company, which is just two or three people, in which we're developing software for people with low vision, not totally blind, to help them handle information, is the way I like to describe it.
This involves not only reading but also today accessing the Internet, doing email, handling their personal affairs, writing correspondence, just keeping track of their bills, their finances, their correspondence, in a way, independently, so they don't have to depend on someone else to help them.
The target population is largely seniors that have macular degeneration, though what we're developing works with almost any visual disorder, as long as the person has some residual vision. I feel that this is a group that hasn't had the attention by technologists, to the extent that [the] totally blind have. There's a huge population which I feel is a large need.
Tony Candela: Would you call that a niche market within a niche market?
Jim Bliss: That's right. But the niche is probably bigger than the totally blind niche, in a way. On the other hand it's probably, on a per capita basis, much less funded because most of our customers' employment is not an issue because they're beyond the employment age and there aren't as many programs that are really aimed at helping these people as there are people who are younger.
Tony Candela: And demographics being what they are, this population's going to get bigger and bigger.
Jim Bliss: That's what everyone forecasts and I suspect it's true. I'm amazed at how many people who contact us that have a vision problem that I don't think have ever been contacted by anything that I would call the blindness system. In other words, they just sort of developed a vision problem and know nothing about the organizations and services that are currently available.
Tony Candela: So you seem to really care about this group of people. This sounds to me to be more than just a business for you.
Jim Bliss: Well, I always felt that I cared more about the customers, no matter who they were, but I guess as I've gotten older I sort of sympathize with the seniors and that's one thing and the other end of the spectrum we're also working on, which are the young people, particularly young children that have a visual problem, and how do we get them into the world of handling information and as you go through the educational system it's become almost essential that you're able to handle the Internet, because more and more Internet is being used in the educational process. And so, that's one of the things we're trying to do, is to make the Internet more accessible to people with a visual problem.
Tony Candela: Closing the digital divide.
Jim Bliss: Right.
Tony Candela: Do you spend a lot of time in schools? Do you visit the schools?
Jim Bliss: We do visit schools and we do spend time in schools. I've worked with the California School for the Blind and with individual schools, particularly in this area. Because we are small, a lot of our work has been limited to California and the West Coast, but we do spend quite a bit of time with students, working with their problems and their issues.
Tony Candela: Are you still involved with the hands-on design of the products that you make?
Jim Bliss: I'm involved with the design because in a small company you do everything, but I don't do any programming or coding myself, directly. Some of the other guys do that but I kind of work with them, tell them the feedback I'm getting from the field, what's needed, and help in the sort of objectives and what we're trying to develop and they do the actual coding.
Tony Candela: In the past were you directly involved with the design—the physical design, the programming, or any other aspect of creation of the products you've been involved with?
Jim Bliss: Oh yeah. Absolutely. In the beginning, back when we were developing the Optacon in particular, I was directly involved in the engineering of that and had worked on a lot of the techniques and circuitry and computer programming. I did programming then, too, in the research that went into the Optacon in particular.
Tony Candela: And the Optacon is where, if I remember, you got your start.
Jim Bliss: That's right. I really studied at MIT when I was working on my doctorate with a person by the name of John Dupes who had been blinded in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge. And he had gotten a small group in the electrical engineering department at MIT interested in the problems of the blind and my thesis advisor, Prof. Sam Mason, sort of became very active with John Dupress and started a group to work on the problems of the blind and that was my real start in this area, this field of blindness.
Tony Candela: When was that?
Jim Bliss: That was 1958-1961. And I did a thesis exploring, using the sense of touch, the tactile sense and the kinesthetic senses as a method of communicating, the idea being that we needed some way of handling information that could be provided from an OCR, from some sort of a device that would convert printed information into something that a person could get a reasonable reading speed from.
And then after I left MIT I came to Stanford, Stanford Research Institute, and discovered that the head of the Electrical Engineering department at Stanford had a blind daughter and wanted to develop a reading machine for the blind. And we joined forces, essentially.
Tony Candela: Who was the head of the department?
Jim Bliss: John Linvill. We joined forces and started a research group.
And the development of the Optacon was very much a team project. There were lots of people involved and I think there were over a dozen PhD theses that were on various aspects of that development because it was very state-of-the-art. It was just at a time when integrated circuits were beginning to be developed and so one of the first things that kind of happened was setting up an integrated circuit laboratory so we could design and build integrated circuits, specifically for the Optacon.
And the Optacon...I think it was the earliest consumer product with a silicon retina in it.
Tony Candela: What is a silicon retina?
Jim Bliss: It's a key component that is now in digital cameras, video cameras, but at that time there wasn't any such thing. People were using things like vidicon tubes, which are big and consumed a lot of power and so forth. And it's the little chunk of silicon, with an array of photosensitive devices on it that we call the retina because it converted essentially points of light into electrical signals. And if you put an image on it, with an optical system, it converts the picture then into something that the rest of the circuitry can deal with.
Tony Candela: Who were some of the other members of the team?
Jim Bliss: Sort of the head of the integrated circuits effort was Jim Rinegold. Another PhD student who actually was the other founder of Telesensory was Stephen Brugler.
And so the four of us, Linvill, Rinegold, Brugler and myself were the founders of Telesensory and our first product was the Optacon and we went through all the challenges of that.
Tony Candela: Was this area of the country, we are in California in an area known as the Silicon Valley, was it known as Silicon Valley back then?
Jim Bliss: No, that was just the beginning, no. It's kind of an interesting thing that the funding of the Optacon, which John Linvill played a key role in getting significant funding for its development, established the Integrated Circuits Lab at Stanford, which put the electrical engineering department on the map and actually put them ahead of MIT, which hadn't begun the silicon effort [yet].
Of course, things were happening in nearby companies that were also very advanced, like Hewlett-Packard and other companies in the area. Fairchild, which later became Intel and became a real leader in integrated circuitry.
Tony Candela: So you were on the ground floor of something much larger than blindness technology. You were in the middle of a phenomenon.
Jim Bliss: That's right, but we were dealing with a niche market, as I said earlier, so we were, off to the side, but we were really trying to apply the technology to our niche.
...That was the time of significant student unrest and a lot of protest about so much of the country's resources going into weapons and Department of Defense kinds of things.
In fact, I remember one time at Stanford, when I was teaching a course there, there was a student protest in my class where students were sitting in and one of the students was a blind girl who had a prototype of our Optacon. And she was sitting, one of the protestors in the class.
Tony Candela: So "equality for people with disabilities" had begun a long time before the ADA.
What made you move from MIT to Stanford? How did that come about?
Jim Bliss: Well, I had originally been at Stanford and received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. And when I had the opportunity, because of a national science foundation fellowship that I received, to go anywhere in the country I decided I'd give MIT a try and see another part of the country I had never seen before.
So, I went to MIT and it was a great experience and I think it's a great school and I learned a lot there but in terms of living in Boston, I decided I prefer California. I came back.
Tony Candela: Especially in the winter.
Jim Bliss: I agree with that.
Tony Candela: Were you born in this part of the country?
Jim Bliss: No, actually I was born in Fort Worth, Texas and lived most of my young life, until I was fifteen years of age, in Oklahoma. Then, a significant thing was that my father was transferred in his job to Chicago and so we moved to Chicago and I finished high school in Chicago and then went to Northwestern undergraduate.
Tony Candela: What did you father do?
Jim Bliss: He was an accountant for Argon and Co., which is a big meat packer.
Tony Candela: And your mom?
Jim Bliss: She was basically a homemaker though she always had something going on and was a big influence through the whole time.
Tony Candela: How did you find your way into becoming an engineer?
Jim Bliss: Well, I was always interested in math particularly. Math more than science. Even when I was in Oklahoma. I think in the 9th grade I won a math contest in Oklahoma and then when I went to Chicago I was fortunate enough to win, to come in at a high level, in a contest, a math contest that was in the city of Chicago.
And the reward for that contest is that there were several scholarships to go to college. The first place was MIT. Second place was Northwestern, and Illinois Institute of Technology. As it turned out I ended up with the Northwestern scholarship and ended up going to Northwestern.
I was still very interested in math, knew practically nothing about engineering. Didn't even know what engineers did. But the scholarship was only for engineering so I asked everyone, "Well, what branch of engineering has the most math?" And the answer was electrical engineering. So I went to electrical engineering because it had more math than any of the other branches.
Tony Candela: Whereas most of the world avoids math, you were looking for math.
Jim Bliss: Right.
Tony Candela: I guess that's the hallmark of an engineer.
So if you dare to date yourself, what year did you graduate from Northwestern?
Jim Bliss: 1956, and I was in the last class at Northwestern that didn't have anything to do with transistors. Up until that point, everything was vacuum tubes. And then when I graduated from Northwestern, I took a job at Stanford Research Institute and when I got there, I discovered that vacuum tubes were totally out and everything was transistors. It was fortunate that I was working on a master's at the same time and that was important.
Tony Candela: Did you have any idea at an early age, let's say, when you were a high school student (and you mentioned you didn't know much about the field of engineering), did you have an idea that you wanted to build things or make things when you were growing up?
Jim Bliss: Not really. I really wasn't that interested in building things. I wasn't the kind of electrical engineering student that tinkered and built radios or any of that. I was more interested in just doing math. It was only later that I really got into the hardware and that was largely an influence, I think, at Northwestern because at that time at Northwestern, the engineers, part of the engineering training was to do things like welding and machine shop and power engineering was the big thing, electrical engineering. So there was a big lab for running electric generators and motors and much more that sort of thing than there was electronics.
Tony Candela: Electronics were just beginning to come into their own as you hit Northwestern. Do you remember a big hoopla about a transition from let's say the vacuum tube to the transistor, from the old to the new? Was there that kind of a feel about things back then?
Jim Bliss: Oh yeah, but not at Northwestern. It was really when I came to California that that happened. But at Northwestern, at the time, all electrical engineering students or all engineering students... The School of Engineering there, had what's called "a cooperative plan." It was required that after your first year, every other quarter you had to work in industry.
And the job I got was working at Argon National Lab. That was sort of a first experience with basic research because I worked with a physicist at Argon National Lab studying the electrical properties of insulators. We did some very basic research, measuring extremely small currents. And to do the instrumentation for that research required building electronics panes and building research apparatus. And that's where we kind of got into building things.
Tony Candela: When you do that kind of basic research, do you have an end product in mind at that point or is it solely for knowledge?
Jim Bliss: At that time it wasn't specifically an end product but the reason I was interested in the electrical properties of ventilators had more to do with nuclear reactors, what happened when the insulators were irradiated and Argon National Lab was sort of a follow on after the Manhattan Project, which was the atomic bomb project. And so the physics lab where I was working was really aimed at basic research having to do with the production and control of atomic power.
Tony Candela: Do you remember the first time you ever met a blind person?
Jim Bliss: Well, the first time, that's a good question, the first time I ever met a blind person was when I was very young and I met my grandmother, who happened to be blind. I only saw her once or twice, it was not like we had a close connection but I remember thinking about how unusual it was, just wondering all about blindness at that point.
Tony Candela: Do you remember her leaving an impression beyond that, that came back to you later, when you got into blindness products, or was it kind of separated in your mind?
Jim Bliss: I think it did come back to me later that I met this person and had just wondered how you lived when you were blind and what had all happened, but my first real experience, in depth, with a blind person, was John Dupress at MIT. And he really was charismatic and in spite of his tremendous handicaps, because it was more than just blindness, he had lost a hand as well, and he did have the leadership quality of getting a group of engineering students very interested in the problems of the blind.
Tony Candela: You were born in Texas. What are your nationalities? It's hard to figure out from B-l-i-s-s.
Jim Bliss: It's totally English roots. The first Blisses came over to this country in the 1600s and I think most people with that surname came from the three brothers who immigrated to the US in that time.
Tony Candela: You can trace it back, to some extent, that far?
Jim Bliss: Well, I can't really trace my branch back that far. Mine goes back to the 1700s, when there was a disconnect but I don't know what happened then.
Tony Candela: And your mom's side of the family? Also English?
Jim Bliss: Yes. Mom's side of the family was also English and her family actually had come from Kentucky.
Tony Candela: Now you were growing up during I guess we would call the heat of the beginning of the Cold War, McCarthyism all that. You mentioned later Department of Defense influences on the technology realm, but when you were coming up through the ranks, as it were, things were pretty tense, I would imagine.
Jim Bliss: That's right. Particularly working at Argon National Labs. I remember when there was quite a scare at Argon because McCarthyism was really rampant and there were some physicists particularly at Argon that had subscribed to the Daily Worker and other things and they were under suspicion and people were afraid they'd lose their secret clearances and there was all kinds of things like that.
And then later, there were the student protests that were taking place and the National Guard was being called out to stand between you and the protestors.
Tony Candela: When you got to Northwestern, what was the feel, in terms of just the politics of the world or student politics? Was there a whole lot going on there?
Jim Bliss: No. I think in the '50s, things were pretty quiet at Northwestern. I don't remember anything particularly, any kind of political movement. The big thing was panty raids at the girls' dorms.
But when I came to California, then it got more interesting.
Tony Candela: Yeah, by the time you had gotten to Stanford we were well into the heat of culture change, as it were.
You are married. And you are a father. You're married to Joan. How long have you been married?
Jim Bliss: Forty years this month.
Tony Candela: Congratulations.
Jim Bliss: I have two children and they both live nearby. One is a medical doctor and the other is a civil engineer.
Tony Candela: Tell us their names?
Jim Bliss: Judy Bliss is a medical doctor, works for a county hospital in Martinez. And John is a civil engineer and he started his own company and sold his own company and is now working for another group.
Tony Candela: A chip off the old block.
Jim Bliss: In some ways. In some ways he's quite different.
Tony Candela: Jim, you have a collection of memorabilia. We're in your home. I was here once before, and you have actually saved some old pieces of equipment and documents and pictures, most of which are just cluttering up your space because they don't work any more. But you've saved things through the years. Did you do that consciously or is it things that just happen to happen?
Jim Bliss: Some just happen to happen but I've saved most... In fact since you were here I found that my wife had kept a file of things that we did and she had a lot of newspaper clippings and things she had in her file. So I found those.
Tony Candela: And Candy Linvill is Jim Linvill's daughter.
Jim Bliss: John Linvill's daughter.
Tony Candela: John Linvill's daughter, right.
Was she the inspiration for the Optacon?
Jim Bliss: She was the inspiration for the Optacon and that was John Linvill's real vision, I think, for the Optacon was making something for her to read with. And this picture shows an early prototype of the Optacon, with her actually using it to read. And it tells about how she had been the first person to use it and to read it.
Tony Candela: And was that a proud day when the first Optacon was put into her hands and she started to work with it?
Jim Bliss: Yeah, I'm sure it was. She was a Stanford student at that time and we were building prototypes of Optacons no two of which were alike. Every one was different and I'd run it over to her dorm room and leave it with her to try for a while and come back later and found out she had dropped it and broken it or she had this problem with it or that problem and then we would redesign or change it or fix it or whatever and try something else.
And so we went through a whole series of prototypes. By today's standards, development of the Optacon took a very long time. It was a six-year project, really. During that time, part of the reason it was slow was because of it being a university lab with students coming and going, in terms of development, but also funding was always iffy for the project and we were between projects waiting for the next grant or what have you.
We were at the edge of technology. We were trying to do something that was really at the forefront. The first Optacons had just individual photo diodes that we had to put together in an array with fiber optics going to feed the light to it from the image. It was only later that we managed to build integrated circuits to make it small.
There were two custom integrated circuits that were developed for the Optacon and that took a long time. So it was a real challenge. This was before microprocessors, there weren't any microprocessors and memory was a problem, and so we were really challenging the technology to be able to do this.
Tony Candela: The word software, was it even used back then, in terms of how this information got stored just to get the machine to work?
Jim Bliss: It wasn't used in the Optacon. When I was at MIT I worked on and learned how to program a computer which I used even at Stanford Research Institute to do a lot of initial research. Because the first thing we did, before we built an Optacon, was simulated on a computer. To prove that this concept of being able to recognize print with your fingertip would actually work, we built a tactile array, simulated all of the electronics, and put letters out under the tactile array from a computer. And Candy Linvill and others were really the guinea pigs that demonstrated that you could actually read this.
And given that simulation, we went to the various funding agencies and said, "See, it works." And no one understood a simulation at that point so sort of to our surprise most funding agencies weren't convinced with our simulation, not believing that was anything real and it was only later that we were able to convince people that this was something worth doing.
Tony Candela: So in addition to the electronics, the tactile elements, you also had to deal with the casing, the things that most of us see from the outside. Did you worry a lot about that in the beginning?
Jim Bliss: At the beginning we didn't worry a whole lot, but we did build the packages the smallest we could. The first Optacons were multiple pieces spread out on a table and then it became sort of, the next versions, were something that was maybe like 12 inches by 12 inches, they were fairly big. We built those in a leather case and then a little wooden box to try and make it handy.
At the time, there were a lot of hippies around, and I discovered this hippie who was making all kind of purses and things out of leather and we thought that was kind of neat, and in style at the time, and so we got him to make Optacon cases for us. He later built cases for years at the Optacon and sort of 10,000 Optacons later I discovered he was no longer a hippie, had a business suit on and was clean-shaven and short-haired and made a complete transition, I think, as a result of the Optacon business.
Tony Candela: In the days when you were actually developing the Optacon, what would a typical day be like for you? You get up, you eat breakfast, you go to the lab and then what happens?
Jim Bliss: Well, I was one of two people that had a split appointment between SRI, Stanford Research Institute, and Stanford so I'd spend half my time at Stanford University and half the time at SRI.
We developed the tactile array, basically, at SRI. The silicon retina was developed at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering Department and then the packaging was also kind of done at Stanford. So I was always running back and forth and in the midst of all this, we were running these computer simulation experiments and I was working with various graduate students who were doing their PhD on certain aspects of the Optacon. I worked more with the PhD students who were studying the tactile sense, and how much resolution did the fingertip have, and how did the tactile sense work, and what kind of design parameters we needed to know, like what frequency should the stimulators vibrate at, what was the ideal frequency, what was the ideal spacing of those stimulators, and things of that sort.
Other people at Stanford were developing how should the photosensors work. How do you do the integrated circuits? How do you build this sort of electronic system? It was sort of meshing those two kinds of research together into a design that actually would function.
Tony Candela: Did you have to, yourself, learn a lot of human physiology and things of that nature? Did you find yourself drifting to learn about things that you sort of needed to know to do the design?
Jim Bliss: Yes. And we all took a very academic approach on that, in that the literature at that time had sort of, the psycho-physical literature was saying that the most you could do was put maybe ten stimulators on a person's body and we wanted to put 144 of them on a person's fingertips. And so that was something we were kind of going against what the current thinking was.
And then most of the neuro-physiological literature as well as the psycho-physical literature was saying that the sharpest receptive fields, the most sensitivity of the fingers had a relatively low vibration frequency, around 60 Hz. And we wanted to vibrate the Optacon at around 200 Hz.
A couple of PhD theses showed that the sensitivity was actually better at 200 Hz. We needed the 200 Hz because to get any sort of reading rate. At 60 Hz the letter would be gone by the time it had gone up and down once or twice and it wouldn't be adequate.
So I actually called a conference at SRI of the best known neurophysiologists and psychophysicists at that time to say, "Look, you guys are saying that the receptivity fields and it's more sensitive at 50 Hz and we've got data that shows that that's not true. Explain it. And they went away without an explanation. (They) never resolved why their data was different than what we were finding.
Tony Candela: When Candy was testing these devices and dropping them occasionally, what types of things would she rave about and what would she complain about? I suppose you would remember the complaining more than the raving.
Jim Bliss: Her personality was such that she wouldn't do a lot of complaining. She would tell us and it was more that things would get somewhat broken, which we learned a lot about how to recognize it, with the Stanford students particularly moving around a lot.
But I remember one time I took it over to her dorm room and she wasn't there but her roommate was and I said, "I'd like to leave her a note," and she said, "Well, if you print it like a typewriter she can read it herself." And she was using the Optacon.
Tony Candela: It's kind of like the story within the story. That must have made you feel proud that she was actually using this thing and her roommate was aware, too.
Jim Bliss: And knew about her independence.
Tony Candela: About what year was all that happening?
Jim Bliss: That was happening in the '60s actually, the late '60s. By 1970, we had what we felt was a really workable design that had been proven. We had something like ten people using these various prototypes and we founded Telesensory in 1970 and made our first Optacons then late '70 and early '71.
Tony Candela: And Telesensory, as you said, was founded initially to develop further and sell the Optacon.
Jim Bliss: That's right. And it was really founded by four engineers who knew practically nothing about business. And we were fortunate enough to keep it going and get funding for it.
And I really feel that that was sort of the key thing that we accomplished was demonstrating that technology could be applied to a real human problem and you could make a commercial company out of that, that was a for-profit company, not a non-profit or charity or what have you. And make it go just by selling things.
You may say, "Well, so what," but at that time, almost every famous line, particularly, was sort of provided from a non-profit company or free of charge or by some government agency rather than blind people doing it themselves.
Tony Candela: What was the reaction when you put that notion out there, both in mainstream America but also among blind people that you were going to actually try to make money on the blind? Was that basically the message?
Jim Bliss: It wasn't an easy message to get across. There was a lot of resistance, both from society and blind people to some extent. But our belief was that that was the only way to make blind people truly independent. As long as they were depending on some sort of subsidy or government grant or what have you, they weren't independent. At the same time, we felt that that was the only way—that a company that was profit making was the only way you could attract the best people to work on things and really do the first class job that needed to be done.
Tony Candela: This sounds like the kind of thinking that comes out of a tradition of excellence that you've been involved in, you and your partners, at Stanford and other places you were used to the best. And this was a new notion back then. Did you have others helping you develop the notion or did you guys think of this yourself?
Jim Bliss: That's right, it was a tradition of excellence in that we wanted to do everything in a first rate fashion and felt the way to do that was to make it attractive to the first-rate people to have enough funding to be able to do it that way.
And I would say that John Linvill, in particular, was sort of the visionary and the leader in that notion. As a result, he was able to get us the funding from investors and so forth to really start the company. Without that concept I don't think that would have ever gone over.
Tony Candela: Did you have any doubts yourself that you'd be willing to admit all these years later about whether it would fly?
Jim Bliss: Well, there were doubts, but I guess we were sort of stubborn. In fact, we had Stanford Business School students, at one point, do a little project: Can you make a business out of the Optacon? And they came over and told us, no, that that wouldn't work.
A lot of people were telling us that this wasn't a good idea. And, in truth, there are some real barriers and it isn't and can't be the kind of company that a lot of investors like to see, that has explosive growth and an unlimited market potential. So, it's got to be accepted as a company that's going to have slower growth. It can be very stable but it can't be expected and people shouldn't invest in it if they expect it's going to explode into a large company.
Tony Candela: You did get outside investors?
Jim Bliss: Yes, we managed to get some very small investments from a couple of individuals and, very interesting, a small investment that helped a lot from Stanford University itself. This was kind of a pioneering thing that Stanford was doing at that time, and that is investing in some of the companies that came out of their research in their labs.
Tony Candela: You also must think about the way that modern business is conducted as being a much more recent phenomenon but here you can see the roots, going all the way back in terms of speculation about how a product will sell to investors who are interested in more than just making huge profits. Maybe that's actually turned around and now you can't find an investor any more unless there's a promise of huge profits.
Jim Bliss: I think there has been that kind of a trend. It's a really difficult sell because it's got to be some one who has a combination of reasons to invest: both making a profit and being more patient in terms of growth, because explosive growth potential just isn't there.
But we founded Telesensory, really, with $75,000: $25,000 from Stanford and $25,000 from each of two other individuals. And at that time there wasn't any so-called venture capital firm involved. Later, a venture capital firm did come in and invest some more and gave us another kind of leg up. But from 1970, when we founded Telesensory, we had a very good looking growth curve and the company was developing and we were looking into other markets and other products. And things went very well until 1981.
Tony Candela: And would you be willing to disclose who the venture capitalist was?
Jim Bliss: It was a company called Sutter Health, which was local here. They came in, really based on...one of the members of the firm felt that this was something they should do. And they put someone on the Board. His name was Draper. And he later became head of the Import/Export Bank. But he never played a role in Telesensory after the company made the investment. Through all of this I think we got a real education in business and how things work, even though we were all engineers.
Tony Candela: So, what else do you have there?
Jim Bliss: I've got an interesting paper from an AFB journal here, that was printed in February of 1974. The authors are Lou Goldish and Harry Taylor. The title of the paper, this was in The New Outlook, which is an AFB publication: "The Optacon, a Valuable Device for Blind Persons."
What they did was a survey of blind people that were using the Optacon and sort of described the age distribution and employment distribution and what they used it for and so forth. It's an interesting study and it did help us a lot, in terms of legitimatizing the Optacon because the Optacon was kind of a revolutionary product which caused a lot of concern among various quarters. For example, there was a fear, which we were na?ve enough not even to try to explain. There was a fear that it might replace braille. Of course that was never a possibility, in the sense that the Optacon is only a reading device and braille is a writing and a reading device or system.
And the Optacon was also a technological device that was foreign to most of the infrastructure of the blindness system, because almost everyone in the blindness system had been trained in social work or rehabilitation, in the sense, not using any technology. And the options for blind people were much different than what we were trying to do. We were trying to make it possible for a blind person to read any document and we would go into the centers, blindness centers and so forth, and try to explain to them about technology and running this device and how you do it. This was a very foreign thing. Something that staff wasn't educated in or didn't know anything about. It was a bit of a revolution in that sense, too.
Tony Candela: A lot of inertia possibly on both blind people themselves as well as the professionals that work with them.
Jim Bliss: To some extent, but I think it was the blind people themselves that made it go because there was also a very strong feeling among certain blind people that they wanted this and if it hadn't have been for that demand from the end users [it] wouldn't have really happened.
But changing the bureaucracy within a blindness organization was often difficult. We ended up setting up our own training system and success with the Optacon was largely dependent on training. Without the training, it was a very difficult instrument for a person to learn without being taught.
And the most successful format for training was an intensive two-week course where people did nothing but work on the Optacon for two weeks.
And we had this in California. People came from all over the country and in some cases internationally to Palo Alto and spent the two weeks in a motel and we had classes every day. And that worked. But when you go out into the field and have someone that comes into the room once or twice or week or once every other week and spends a little bit of time with an Optacon, like an hour or so, it takes forever to master it.
Tony Candela: So you had realized already or came upon a groundswell of blind folks who were ready, willing, and able to take on this new technology?
Jim Bliss: There were a lot of blind people who were really anxious to do something like this. At that time we didn't know what the limitations on reading rate would actually be and we hoped that after years of use the people would get to be very fast with it.
But, the fact of the matter was that no one ever got as fast, I believe, as they could read braille. The limitations of the sense of touch and the complexity of alphanumeric characters—it's more limited than that. The great advantage of it was that you can read virtually anything. It doesn't first have to be translated into braille.
Tony Candela: You were with Telesensory until 1981?
Jim Bliss: 1991.
Tony Candela: And you mentioned that there was an attempt out there to produce an electronic braille device. Because braille still lived on. It started in France and you folks were connected to that effort in some way. I'd like you to tell us the whole story of how these braille devices came to be. Because you eventually got into that business yourself.
Jim Bliss: Right. After the Optacon we were interested in what other product we should come out with and we realized that the company was going to be limited in size, if it only had one product. It would also be very vulnerable to anything happening to that product, so we wanted to diversify and get some other products.
And our second product, this is a little off the subject, but our second product, which turned out to be a huge success was the Speech Plus calculator. And those were the times that calculators were becoming the vogue because electronics was able to make hand-held calculators that were battery powered and very useful. But there was no such thing for a blind person.
We decided that we would try to develop as our second product, a calculator for the blind. And we discovered that there was one very clever inventor, Tim Cranmer—who had done the Cranmer abacus—who had a concept for what calculator output could be and it was really a way of coding, a series of beeps and so forth, so that you could tell what the numbers were.
We thought we were going to use that so we had some discussions with Tim Cranmer and sort of laid out the design of the calculator. We took that to our patent attorney to kind of protect the intellectual property and he pointed out that he was also working on a separate patent from a Berkeley professor on how to make synthesized speech.
So he got the two of us together and we dropped the Cranmer approach and immediately went to speech because it was a so much more natural way to go. And at that time, because of the limitations in memory, you had very little memory capability so the speech synthesis method, which was really digitized speech, was highly compressed into a small amount of memory and we came out with the Speech Plus calculator.
And this was something like three years ahead of Texas Instruments' similar product, so we were again at the forefront of technological development.
To get back to your original question, after the Speech Plus calculator, our third product we sort of heard about a French invention called the Digi-cassette that was done by a person by the name of Oleg Tretiakoff.
(End of Part 1 of 4)
