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

10. Revolutions

1 10 ~ REVOLUTIONS The first decade ofTTY development was marked by incremental progress against great odds. By 1973, only a few thousand TTYs were in use for the estimated 13 million Americans with hearing loss. Many deaf people were still unaccustomed to using the telephone almost a decade after the development of the Phonetype modem. People deafened in old age were often unaware of the technology, and telephone companies made little effort to reach them. There were still some states in which no deaf person had access to a TTY. Weitbrecht's modem was a major breakthrough, but refining it had taken time. Developing a reliable source of teletypewriters had also been a painfully slow process. Changing attitudes of deaf people, accustomed to years without direct phone access, and hearing people, accustomed to decades of ignoring deaf people's telecommunication needs, was a huge challenge. TTY distribution, competently administered by TDI, was still cumbersome, labor intensive, and time consuming. For years, progress had been measured in tiny, halting steps, but in the early 1970s the pace of change suddenly quickened in both the United States and abroad. On April 1, 1973, Andrea Saks's efforts finally bore fruit when two deaf persons made the first TTY call in the United Kingdom. They used Phonetype modems in Solihull (near Birmingham) and Bromley , in Kent. The historic British call was made nearly a decade after the first American TTY call. The biggest impediment to English progress was not technology but attitude. To begin with, deaf people in England needed to verify their deafness in order to be allowed to use a telephone device. Saks wrote to Marsters that although the Post Office was beginning to recognize that the TTY was an appropriate "deaf 138 REVOLUTIONS I 139 person's telephone," she had to fight for the right of hearing relatives, friends, and professionals working with deaf people to have access to the equipment. At first, the Post Office-the government agency responsible for administering telecommunications services-even objected to placing a TTY in the Royal National Institute for the Deaf building. Officials argued that big businesses should follow normal Post Office policy and use Telex (similar to TWX in the U.S.) for telecommunications data. Transatlantic TTY calls presented another problem altogether, one that would take a long time to overcome. Saks could telephone her parents in California from England, even though the Post Office frowned on such calls. She did this by direct dialing. From the United States, however, calls to England had to go through an operator, and the FCC prohibited international TTY calls originating from the United States. The FCC's position was related to the sending ofbusiness data, the original use of teletypewriters. At that time, the federal agency was evaluating which common carriers would share the lucrative market for sending data across the voice telephone network. Among those with stakes in the decision were the giant corporations Western Union International, ITT World Communications, RCA Global Communications , and AT&T, as well as a smaller company, Tropical Radio and Telegraph, which had a license to communicate from its ships carrying bananas. Saks convinced the comparable body in England-the Post Office- to inform the FCC ofits support for her request to permit deaf people to use TTYs. She explained to officials ofthe common carriers that TTY calls were not just tones and signals-the calls represented communication by human beings who were alive at that moment in time. But in the minds of most U.S. telecommunications service providers, the use of a teletypewriter implied the sending of business data. As soon as the word "teletypewriter" was mentioned, an operator would deny the telephone call because of the regulations. Saks approached this limitation on international phone access through the American political system. She placed person-to-person calls to Senators Hubert Humphrey and Alan Cranston, Congressmen 140 I REVOLUTIONS Ronald V. Dellums and John Burton, and executives of the FCC and the common carriers in an effort to persuade them. In a letter to Dellums, she explained that she had three members of Parliament willing to sponsor a TTY demonstration call. In arguing for the transatlantic call, she wrote in July of 1974 that deaf people "are beginning to play an important part in the future of the world, and their enthusiasm will be at a very high level as they have been so restricted before. . . . they deserve to...