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

1. A Chance Encounter

1 [ .L_ A CHANCE ENCOUNTER The telephone companies have not offered anything at realistic rates to deaf people, so some ofus had to "go at it" on our own to develop a suitable communication device using . .. cast-offteleprinters. -Robert H. Weitbrecht, letter to Freeman Lang, September 15, 1966 On April 11, 1963, deaf physicist Robert Haig Weitbrecht turned forty-three years old. He was living in the hills west of Redwood City, California, in a new two-bedroom duplex on Woodside Road. Weitbrecht had converted a bedroom into a radio "ham shack," and his living room was strewn with radio equipment, electrical meters, boxes of electronic parts, and books. Scattered around his bedroom were issues of RTTY Journal, a periodical for radioteletype users. A few months after his birthday, Weitbrecht's chance encounter with the father of a deaf child would change deaf people's lives forever. Weitbrecht was an unlikely person to become a hero for the American deaf community. For much of his life, he had stayed apart from deaf people, socializing with them infrequently, perhaps because ofan overprotective mother and memories of childhood teasing about his deafness. But his parents had nurtured in him a love of science, and this fascination was compelling throughout his life. It was also essential to his success in developing the telephone acoustic coupler. As a child, Weitbrecht developed a special interest in astronomy and receiving Morse code signals by feeling vibrations. At fifteen, he was allowed to connect his own practice oscillator-complete with batteries and a headphone-to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) code-sending machine to demonstrate that he could 9 10 I A CHANCE ENCOUNTER receive Morse code at thirteen words per minute, the time necessary to be eligible for an amateur radio license. A month later, his mother interrupted his class and hand-delivered the license as his classmates looked on. He was officially a "ham." Weitbrecht's interest in science guided both his choice of professions and his hobbies. He began his college career at Santa Ana Junior College in 1938 and then moved on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his bachelor's degree in astronomy with honors in 1942. He worked as a physicist at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California and as an electronics scientist with the Manhattan Project during the war. In 1949, he was honored with the Superior Accomplishment Award by the U.S. Naval Air Missile Test Center in Point Mugu, California. Morse code transmitted by radio waves became Weitbrecht's particular obsession because it permitted him to communicate with other radio hams despite his deafness. In 1950, he sought to expand this long-distance contact by acquiring a used Model 12 "receive only" teletypewriter, usually called a TTY (and sometimes called a teleprinter )/ from a Los Angeles newspaper plant. With the new machine, he could receive radioteletype communications from Japan, the Philippine Islands, Australia, South America, and many places in the United States. Before long, though, he realized that receiving radioteletype messages was not enough to satisfy him. He also wanted to send his own. He searched for six months and finally procured a keyboard from an East Coast ham. Using a string around the gear and the shaft of an old washing machine motor, he managed to adjust the speed until the mechanical keyboard worked. He had his first "send and receive" teleprinter outfit. This was the first time Weitbrecht had full visual access to long-distance radio communications. Prophetically, he wrote "RTTY ... is now an important and growing facet of Amateur Radio, with untold possibilities for communications purposes."2 Weitbrecht's experience with his radioteletype station, one of the first on the air since amateur radio began, taught him the value ofchallenging government communications regulations. In January of 1951, A CHANCE ENCOUNTER I 11 he petitioned the FCC to permit radioteletype operation on a broader range of frequencies. Mter serious consideration, the FCC granted his request. The successful challenge opened more opportunities for RTTY communication among his amateur radio friends. Weitbrecht left California in 1951 and moved to Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where he became known to other hams as "The Wisconsin Wizard." At Yerkes he designed electronic instrumentation for use in astronomical research, earned a master's degree in astronomy from the University of Chicago, and aided in the development of the worldwide WWV-WWVH Radio...