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

5. The Frustration Grows

~THE FRUSTRATION GROWS The Robert H. Weitbrecht Company partners were not alone in their disappointment with the telephone companies, of which there were about two thousand in the mid-1960s. Not all were part of the nationwide Bell Telephone System, but none made any effort to help profoundly deaf people access telecommunications. The TTY network had grown to only six stations during the first year, and frustration was mounting in the deaf community. In October of 1965, Robert G. Sanderson, the president of the National Association of the Deaf, lost patience with the ineffective gadgets AT&T was marketing for deaf people. In an editorial he targeted the most recent device, Sensicall, which was selling for $25, with a monthly service charge of $3, in addition to the regular service fee. Developed by a Garden City Park, Long Island, engineer with the New York Telephone Company, Sensicall was a code device that included a small lamp that flashed when the person on the other end hummed, whistled, or tapped on the handset. Sanderson particularly criticized the service charges: "This sounds like highway robbery to me because it does not cost the telephone company a single dime to have this device in operation ... I do not see why deafpeople should be penalized for trying to make increased use of the telephone."l That same month, Jean Leigh, a member ofthe Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, wrote a letter to the editor of The Volta Review noting that various devices offered promise for profoundly deaf people, yet no great help appeared forthcoming from the telephone companies. Electrowriters were being used by several deaf people on Long Island, at Public School #47, the junior high school for deaf students in Manhattan, and at the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, 57 58 I TH E FRUSTRATION GROWS where a deafcounselor was employed. Afew were using TTYs through AT&T's expensive TWX service, and Bernstein had a Weitbrecht modem . Each ofthese devices represented a tremendous personal struggle on the part of individual deaf customers to gain rudimentary telephone access. The lack ofinterest in the TTY modem was particularly odd in view of its potential to increase telephone company revenues. "Why is the telephone company so modest?" Leigh demanded to know in her open letter.2 Weitbrecht, Marsters, and Saks shared Leigh's consternation. As 1965 came to a close, an article in the Bell System's periodical, Bell Telephone Magazine, admitted that "At the present time, there is no standard Bell System equipment for use by the totally deaf.,,3 Yet more than thirty years earlier the Communications Act of 1934 had promised "to make available, so far as possible to all the people of the United States, a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communications service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."4 Furthermore, AT&T claimed that its goal was "universal service." Apparently this universe did not include deaf people. What puzzled the trio at the Robert H. Weitbrecht Company the most, though, was how AT&T continued to invest money into research on gadgets that would provide access only through the use of codes. All these devices required a great deal of effort to produce any meaningful communication. Since 1963, the company had been actively promoting the use of Morse code devices. In one Bell System news release, AT&T reported, "One ofthe most ingenious communications services that the Bell System offers the handicapped is a beehive flashing lamp that enables the totally deaf to hold a two-way conversation by phone. It converts dial tone, busy signals and humming sounds into visual signals of varying lengths ... Two people with a little practice can hold an understandable conversation between themselves by humming Morse or some other mutually understandable code, thereby flashing the lamp.,,5 Ingenious? Deaf consumers did not think so, but the more they heard about the TTY and the Weitbrecht modem, the more interested they were in those devices. By September of 1965, Weitbrecht felt that THE FRUSTRATION GROWS I 59 he was being overwhelmed with requests for assistance in acquiring teletypewriter terminals and modems, and he was getting weary from responding. He wrote to Breunig in Indianapolis: "In a way, I enjoy writing such letters - however I find I have less time to devote to my laboratory activities. This will have to be resolved somehow or other."6 Deaf Europeans had also learned about the TTY and became anxious to see it work...