Joel Runyan and the atomic bomb grew up together in Los Alamos, N.M., where his father worked on weapons design and the nuclear rocket engine at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories. Young Noel was convinced the atomic bomb was
”beautiful” and nuclear power was ”neat.” He loved to climb the local water-cooled nuclear reactor and look down at the ”eerie, beautiful blue light.” He even had his own Geiger counter and lead-lined box of uranium ore. For Runyan, to grow up and work on the ”Star Wars” defense plan would have been the equivalent of a son following his father into a steel mill.
Like many children who grew up in Los Alamos, Runyan wanted to set the world on fire. In most places, children show they are hip in a dozen ways, from the music they listen to and the clothes they wear to the sports they play. In Los Alamos, youngsters proved they were cool by excelling in science.
”I started entering projects in science fairs in 3d grade,” Runyan said. ”I always assumed I`d just keep doing bigger and better science projects with bigger and better toys and eventually I`d end up a Nobel laureate.”
But at 38, Runyan is no longer a kid. An explosion when he was 16 caused him eventually to reject the world he grew up in, carefully avoiding work that involved weapons or defense contracts. Instead, he has mortgaged the economic future of his family to create a product that he hopes will improve the lives of thousands of blind people.
What Runyan has developed is a personal computer for blind people. But where other computers have a video display screen, the Talking Tablet, as he calls it, has vertical plastic ridges that divide the ”screen” into a long vertical channel, or margin, on the left and 25 horizontal rows of touch-sensitive controls.
The machine can be a pair of eyes into our technological world for blind people, its audible ”screen” connected to a standard touch-type keyboard and its output transferable to an ordinary printer.
It has a built-in calendar and clock, and it literally will tell the time and date when you use two special command keys on the keyboard to ask it. If you want to find where a record album has been filed in your collection, you ask the computer and it says, ” `James Brown Live at the Apollo,` shelf two, eighth from the left.” If you want to shop for a gift, you call up Comp-u-Store, the computerized home shopping service, using a modem attached to the telephone line and the computer reads aloud the most pertinent information from the catalogue–zeroing in only on blenders, for example–and orders it for you.
When you want to write a check, insert one into the printer that is linked to the tablet; the amount will be correct because as you type, the computer reads aloud each letter and number. (The tablet has such
sophisticated software that it pronounces 1987 as ”nineteen eighty-seven,”
1,987 as ”one thousand nine hundred eighty-seven” and $19.87 as ”nineteen dollars and eighty-seven cents.”)
The Talking Tablet makes the talking typewriter seem like child`s play. The little-used talking typewriter also reads aloud words that are typed into it, but its uses and vocabulary remain limited.
The Talking Tablet–thin, lightweight, battery-powered and portable
–could be a boon in a classroom. The student would type his notes into it;
a small earphone can be connected to the tablet, enabling the student to listen unobtrusively as it reads back the notes. When you want to review the notes for a test, you instruct the computer to read them back to you. When you write a paper, the Talking Tablet becomes a word processor, which allows the writer to rearrange paragraphs and insert and delete words with keyboard commands. The writer can then browse through the text and listen for the corrections.
Connected to a telephone by a modem, the Talking Tablet could enable a blind stockbroker to hear the ticker tape from Wall Street. A blind lawyer could use the Talking Tablet to read the legal data bases that are stored in systems such as Lexis. The average reading speed for Braille is fewer than 100 words a minute. With the Talking Tablet, Runyan said, a blind person could read more than 400 words a minute, and huge numbers of periodicals are available from data bases the Talking Tablet can reach through a modem–far more than are published in Braille.
The device is Runyan`s dream realized; to develop it he left a secure engineering career, living on the financial edge for the last three years.
Whether he would have done any of this if he hadn`t lost his sight is a question that no one, not even Runyan, can answer.
”I told him once, `Noel, you`re real special,` ” recalls a former coworker, Ernest Nassimbene. ”He said, `Ernie, isn`t that true of all blind people?` ” Nassimbene, the inventor of the bar code that is on almost all products in the supermarket, worked with Runyan at International Business Machines in the `70s. ”That`s true, of course, but Noel really is special. He`s one of the truly outstanding engineers around today, and that`s without taking his handicap into account. Beyond that, he`s got more guts than most anybody I know.”
Not all of Noel`s projects were designed to win blue ribbons. If you had a chemistry set when you were a child, you know there is a stage in adolescence when explosives are more fascinating than sex. Like a chemist working for a terrorist organization, Noel worked on secret projects designed to produce exotic combustions and boulder-shattering explosions.
He steadily played with more powerful explosives, escalating to silver acetylide, an unstable substance. Noel was excited about the stuff because
”it was guaranteed to make a really big impression on everybody for the Fourth of July.”
On the last day Runyan saw the world, he carried the silver acetylide into a field near his house. The fuse was wet, which made the explosive even more unstable. It blew up in his face. Lying in a drawer at home were his three pairs of safety glasses.
Noel had eye operations and plastic surgery for months after the accident. One eye operation after another failed, but as long as there were others to try, Runyan could hope his sight would be restored. When the doctors gave up, Runyan had to face what had happened.
A year after the accident, he was ready to return to school. He took a summer-school science class and met a girl named Deborah whose father worked as a metallurgist at the Los Alamos lab. They began dating and, when Noel graduated a year later, Deborah joined him at the University of New Mexico, even though she was a year behind him in high school. It didn`t matter because Deborah was an honors student working at such an accelerated pace that she needed only one class to complete high school. They married three years later, in 1969.
Runyan arrived at the university certain that, blind or not, he could graduate with a degree in physics. He took a few courses, did well and then ran into a professor who thought a blind man in physics was absurd. How could Runyan do basic things like measure heat and light? The professor persuaded the department head to declare blind people ineligible for physics labs, ending Runyan`s undergraduate physics career.
So Runyan wandered over to the electrical engineering department, a condemned man. He associated electrical engineering with fixing television sets. But when he sat down with a group of professors who told him television wasn`t what was happening, computers were, that changed everything.
”The EE professors welcomed me and the challenge of helping me get through,” Runyan said. ”They were much more broad-minded than the people in physics.”
Runyan became the EE department`s best student. He invented a number of tools he needed for his work, including a digital voltmeter with Braille output. It turned out the tools weren`t just for him–blind students who followed Runyan into the EE department had an easier time doing the work because they used the tools, too.
Runyan had discovered his mission.
In 1972, Runyan was named the outstanding electrical engineering student in the country by Eta Kappa Nu, the national EE honor society. He graduated in 1973 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.
”If it wasn`t for the accident, I`d probably have gone on being unfoundedly arrogant,” Runyan said. ”Instead, in college I became more introspective, more sensitive to humanitarian issues and people`s needs. Deb and I came out against the war in Vietnam, nuclear power and got actively involved in solar energy. We broke away from the Los Alamos mentality.”
When he graduated, IBM hired him to work in its advanced systems development division in Los Gatos, Calif. IBM had announced that it would develop technologies for disabled people, and Runyan was part of a team that was assigned to develop a cathode ray tube computer display for the blind, a project that fascinated Runyan. The personal computer was in its infancy, and Runyan thought it could be the answer to many of the most basic problems for the blind. The problem was, how can a blind person access a computer?
The team researched audio electronics and got a bookcase full of material. In just three months, they developed a prototype of what eventually became IBM`s talking typewriter.
But IBM turned the prototype over to its typewriter division in Austin, Tex.; Runyan was extremely unhappy. Though he was willing to move to Austin, he met resistance: ”The manager in Austin said, `This project is going to move really fast. I don`t think a blind person can handle it,` ” Runyan recalls. ”That was after we brought that typewriter from an idea to a prototype in three months! They slaughtered it in Austin, ruined the human factors.”
Runyan spent five years at IBM, but he grew bored and decided to move on. ”I asked myself what I would do if I was independently wealthy and decided my real goal was to help people,” he says. ”I decided the best thing I could do was use my engineering skills to develop aids for the handicapped.”
He decided to build the device himself.
For the last three years, Runyan has worked 16- and 17-hour days, seven days a week. Deborah, a programmer, has worked beside him for a year and a half; in all this time, neither has collected a paycheck. The furniture in their home in Campbell, Calif., is getting worn, and Christmas was pretty lean for their children, 10-year-old Arthur and 5-year-old Tammy.
They say they have no regrets, because in a room in the Runyan home that functions as the lab, warehouse, business office and everything else for Personal Data Systems, the family business, there it sits, the Talking Tablet. ”Let`s see . . . I think I know how to spell it,” Runyan said, pausing over the computer`s keyboard as he offered a demonstration of the machine`s skills.
Runyan`s index finger runs up the vertical margin on the left side of the screen, triggering a bunch of chirps that tell him the columns are empty of text. Then he hits a beep that tells him one row has the text he has just typed into the tablet. He pauses for an instant and runs his finger across the row. In a loud, clear voice the computer reads, ”Su-per-cal-i-frag-i-lis- tic-ex-pi-al-i-d o-cious.”
”The computer senses where I`m touching, so I can point to the information I want,” Runyan said. ”It goes in and gets the information, and the text-to-speech output spells it out letter by letter (`S-u-p-e-r . . .`), or reads it a word at a time (`Su-per-cal-i-frag- i-lis-tic-ex-pi-al- i-do-cious`).
”A change from the normal pitch indicated that the first letter was capitalized. Various changes in tone would have indicated if the word were italicized, underscored or boldfaced.
”We think it will revolutionize life for blind people.”
But there is a big problem with the Talking Tablet: Only one exists. The Runyans took a second mortgage on their house, used their savings and begged loans from relatives to develop the prototype. The Runyans` resources are exhausted, and they need another $100,000 to go into production.
Government and private agencies that have grant money for projects for disabled people are inclined to use it to fund research-and-develop ment projects. ”There wasn`t any of that kind of money around when we started,”
Runyan said. ”And now that we`ve got a product, we`re finding that agencies are allergic to funding anything that is close to production. They`ll tell you, `That`s commercial. You`ve got to go after private funds.` ”
Private investors want to make money, and the hard fact is, there isn`t that much to be made on a product for the blind.
Still, the Runyans aren`t worried. They have some spinoff audio products they can market if the Talking Tablet doesn`t get funded, but they are confident a product as useful as a computer for the blind eventually will be built.
”We`re looking for people who want to do more than just make a profit,” Runyan said. ”We`re looking for people who want to make a difference.”
