Medicine: Reading Machine

Blind workers ended their world conference in Manhattan last week (TIME, April 20) and went visiting in other Eastern communities. Behind them they left a new kind of machine, called the printing visagraph, which enables the blind to read print without the mediation of Braille symbols.

Inventor is Robert Elkan Naumburg, 39, Cambridge, Mass, mechanical engineer, who made his present modest fortune inventing textile machinery and automobile accessories.

The visagraph works as follows: slim beams of light are reflected from a printed page into a selenium cell which translates the blank and printed patches into various electrical frequencies. The currents operate electromagnets which drive pins against a sheet of aluminum. The aluminum progressively becomes embossed with letters as the master light roves across the original page. The blind thereby can feel the upcoming words almost as fast as the eye can see.