A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell (review)

A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell by Harry G. Lang (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2000, xviii, 242 pp., cloth, $29.95)

In the mid-1960s, America’s space program was picking up momentum that would ultimately lead to men walking on the moon. At the same time, three deaf men, Robert H. Weitbrecht, James C. Marsters, and Andrew Saks, set in motion an equally important collaboration that would forever change the lives of deaf people everywhere. A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell, by Harry G. Lang (who is a professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf), tells the story of the invention and popularization of the TTY. Understanding the enormous cultural, economic, political, educational, historical, and social impacts this invention has had on deaf and hard of hearing individuals is reason enough to read this book. But there is an equally compelling reason to do so—this is a terrific story.

The book reads like a mystery, one where you can’t wait to see what happens next. Along the way we learn, for example, that it was Weitbrecht who invented and patented the acoustic modem. We see the struggles that he, Marsters, and Saks waged against uncooperative major corporations and the political system to ensure that their dream of universal communication for all deaf people through regular telephone lines would succeed. We also see the grassroots efforts within the deaf community to ensure that the heavy, old surplus TTYs (the only kind available to the public at the beginning) were reconditioned and installed in the homes of the first telecommunications pioneers.

Weitbrecht, Marsters, and Saks established several criteria when they decided to jointly pursue the TTY for the wider community, and these decisions have yielded enormous dividends for deaf empowerment. Underlying their efforts was their unceasing desire that the design, development, distribution, and advocacy for telecommunications access, to the extent possible, should be controlled by and for the deaf community. In addition, they were guided by four goals for telecommunications access: They wanted the method selected to be available, affordable, portable, and accessible. Author Harry Lang never lets us forget these goals throughout his work, and only when all four are achieved does the battle appear to be won.

As the three partners and their new firm, named APCOM, evaluated every telecommunications device that came along in the era, they were more and more convinced that the technology of connecting teletypewriters with Weitbrecht’s Phonetype modem, as they called it, was the solution to all four goals and universal access. A Phone of Our Own is illustrated with a series of unique archival photographs of many of the devices they rejected in addition to many other historical photographs. The Picturephone displayed at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, for example, was years away from becoming a reality and would be too expensive when it did. (The fact that thirty-five years later it still has not caught on, and probably never will thanks to the Internet, is testament to their judgment.) A series of vibrating or flashing signalers developed in progression by AT&T and others allowed only minimal communication. AT&T, it seems, knew so little about deaf needs that they never really went beyond gadgets that used some kind of code and mostly simple no, yes-yes, or repeat types of signals. It was through the process of ensuring available, affordable, portable, and accessible telecommunications that the world, and especially the corporate world, learned much about deaf society and language.

In fact, the largest obstacles to advancing the widespread availability of universal communication among deaf individuals seemed to lie in the monopolitistic behavior of AT&T, according to Lang. AT&T at the time was the only telephone company in the United States, save for a handful of small local companies...