Listen to Bliss Interview, Part 4

Tony Candela: You come out of a very scholarly and practical heritage, as it were, in those days.

Jim Bliss: Right. It really went from a very academic, scholarly research thing to being [in] business. And that was the transition that sort of happened over a long period of time.

Tony Candela: Well I hope the kids of today are as serious about making sure they prepare themselves well. You clearly, even before you knew you'd be in this business, were preparing yourself. You were learning how to learn. You were obviously paying attention to your schooling, your academic subjects and you laid the groundwork. When one looks back and sees this from the way that I'm able to see it right now, I think back to those days in Oklahoma, when you were learning how to be a good math student, you were learning how to be a good student in general and that's a good foundation.

Jim Bliss: I think that's really the key to university learning: how to keep learning because you never want to stop. So that's what you should learn in college, I believe, is to learn how to learn. It's not so much the courses at the time, particularly in the technological field. It changes so fast that what's important at one point in time with respect to technology may be totally irrelevant a few years later, because the technology has moved on to something else.

Tony Candela: Have you been keeping up with the technologies where they essentially try to enhance the human being directly, such as optical implants and things that would theoretically make the person closer to being normally sighted?

Jim Bliss: I haven't really been keeping up with that though I was on committees, proposal review committees and so forth, in the early days, when some of the first cortical implants were discussed, one in England and at the University of Utah and so forth. And I really haven't kept up with that because I guess, at that time, I was kind of a disbeliever of that being a worthwhile direction to go because I really questioned whether or not you could get any better resolution of an image on the cortex than you could on the fingertip. And there wouldn't be an expensive surgical procedure involved. And there were so many challenges that I thought it was really a long range effort.

Now I know that there's still people working on it and still students, even Stanford students that are doing work on implants with the retina and vision and it's certainly true that the technology has come to the point that you can put millions of transistors on a single chip, which is what you need if you're going to do anything like real vision. Whether or not you can do that in a living organism and keep it alive and make it work, still remains to be seen, I think. But I think that now it looks much more possible than it did 20 or 30 years ago.

To answer your question, I haven't kept up with that. But I have been amazed that the implants for hearing have worked, the cochlear implants. They seem to. That's an example of something that's been pretty successful that we thought years ago would be more or less impossible.

Tony Candela: I only have one other question and I hope you'll talk on this for a couple of minutes. When you were a kid and through your adult years, what are some of the things that you've done for fun? Rabblerousing, athletics...

Jim Bliss: Well, one thing I've always enjoyed is playing tennis. But I was never any good at that. I'd say genetically, as well as any other way. Nobody in my family ever did it. Tennis is an interesting, competitive sport and it's kind of a challenge.

The other thing that's been fun, particularly with my wife, has been travel. And I think our experiences have been kind of unique because they were often a combination of business and pleasure. In other words, trips to England and Germany and Italy and Japan. We just took a trip to New Zealand. Because of the combination, you get to meet real people in the country. It's not like being on a package tour. As well as see the tourist sites but also talk to the people who live there and get some feel for it. So I think the combination of business and pleasure is a good way to see another country, if you take the time.

Tony Candela: What's your favorite reading material?

Jim Bliss: I still like to read scientific periodicals, even though I don't, by scientific articles I don't mean really heavy science, I mean things like Scientific American, and so forth. I've always kind of been fascinated particularly in some of the astrological things, the origin of matter, sort of Einstein things.

I guess one popular book I read recently that I felt was really interesting was A Beautiful Mind, about the story of John Nash, because of his time at MIT and mine, we just missed each other by about a year and we knew some of the very same people, even the minor players, for example, that are mentioned in the book.

There was a fellow by the name of Lindsay Russell that was working on a mobility aid for the blind that turned out lived in the same apartment building as John Nash when he describes it in the book. But that kind of a book I thought was fascinating.

I thought Fermat's Last Theorem was a very interesting book.

Tony Candela: Is that the one where you wrote something in the margin of the book? Is that the right story?

Jim Bliss: Fermat wrote that this is a theorem that is easily proved but I don't have room in the margin (laughter). Three hundred years later, someone finally succeeds in proving it after working on it for several years.

Jim Bliss: One of the stories that's described in that Scott Hager dissertation is sort of the ongoing battle, I would call it almost a battle we had between the Optacon and Stereotoner, which was a reading system that was being promoted by the Veteran's Administration.

The history of that was that, as you probably know, in World War II there were a number of captured German scientists who were brought to this country and one of them was a guy by the name of Hans Mach, that the government set up as Mach Labs and funded him to develop a reading machine for the blind that more or less was his penance for designing V-2 rockets (laughter).

Tony Candela: There's probably something philosophic about that that we can work out later.

Jim Bliss: There was a big vested interest in it from the Veteran's Administration for the Stereotoner and we were challenging him with the Optacon. It was kind of a big, sort of, controversial conflict.

Partly because we were always looking for funding for the Optacon development and the VA was funding a reading machine and so we wanted to compete for the same funding Mach was getting. But they had such a vested interest in Mach that as one government administrator once told me, "If I switch the funding from Mach to you, people would ask me why I spent all that money with Mach." And so that was kind of a challenge.

Tony Candela: Whatever happened with Mach and his Stereotoner?

Jim Bliss: It sort of faded into oblivion. And he became too old.

Harvey Lauer, do you know who Harvey Lauer is? He was one of the world's, one of the few people who could use the Stereotoner. And he was sort of their Candy Linvill, in a sense. That he was the Stereotoner user, the only one who really mastered it very well.

Tony Candela: Well, Harvey Lauer is on my list of people. He, I do believe, is in the Midwest somewhere.

Jim Bliss: In Chicago.

Yeah, I would recommend you ask him about the Optacon-Stereotoner battles.

Tony Candela: I will.

Well, those are interesting stories. Those are things that a lot of people probably don't remember or weren't even around to know about. Especially the younger folks.

Jim Bliss: Right.

Tony Candela: On that note I will turn the machine off.

(End of Interview)