Milestone: TTY Inventor Started As Dentist

James C. Marsters was interested in so many things–a licensed orthodontist, an airplane pilot and a professional magician. But his lasting achievement will be the acoustic modem device he developed to connect the deaf with each other, and eventually with public safety comm centers via 911. Marsters himself was deaf but never let that fact limit his activities before he died last month at age 83. He developed the TTY after brainstorming with Robert Weitbrecht, a physicist and teletype hobbyist who was also deaf. Marsters and two partners founded a company in 1964 to market their new device, which originally used huge AT&T teletype machines to generate characters at one end, and to print out the message at the other end. Later, competitors developed smaller models with integrated keyboards, all based on Marsters’ designs. Today there are alternative methods for the deaf to communicate, but TTY devices remain an important link for the deaf.