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wave puttering has brought him cards from; among others.
But Kutschera can’t read them. He is blind.
ex “Can Machines Learn to Read Aloud?” in Pathfinder News Magazine 59:1 (January 9, 1952) : 38
initial landing, google books snippet : link
entire via archive.org : link
Can machines learn to read aloud?
Lanky Franz Kutschera is a radio “ham” in Hanover, Germany. His short-wave puttering has brought him cards from amateurs in Allentown, Pa., and the Suez Canal Zone, among others. But Kutschera can’t read them. He is blind.
Last week, however, as assistant to inventor and engineer Dr. Walter Blum, he was using his electrical knowledge to help develop a machine which some day may read aloud what is printed on those cards — and in books and magazines. It would open the world of printing to the blind.
The typewriter-sized machine, painstakingly put together in Blum’s home workshop, translates letters into their individual sounds. These are blended together into words at a 600-letter-per-minute speed — “slowly, as if a man born deaf were speaking,” Blum explains.
Match ’em Up. It does the job by projecting “magic lantern” images of the letters — one after another — onto a revolving, drum-like screen. On the screen are transparent letters of the alphabet. When the projected image of a letter coincides with its transparency, the light [39] goes through. That sets off a combination of electrical impulses and light beams which produce the letter’s sound — much like a movie projector makes sound out of a track on film.
Blum’s is not the first attempt to make a machine which can read ordinary books to the blind. They have included a Russian gadget that translated letters into dot-dash code and a German device in which projected images dropped a phonograph needle onto the proper letter-sound groove of a record. None, however, proved successful.
So far, Blum’s device can “read” only the letters L, A, V and O — enough, he says, to give a sufficient range of elemental sounds for testing.
Biggest drawback to the machine is that it reproduces only languages that are pronounced as they are spelled—German, for example. English, with its confusing sounds like “ough” — as in bough, rough, cough and through — “has me beaten now,” Blum says.
about Pathfinder —
[Time] “magazine’s immediate forerunner was the Pathfinder (1894–1954), a weekly rewriting of the news for rural readers.”
ex : britannica.com : link
about Walter Blum’s reading machine —
Blum’s invention of a “reading machine” gets one of four brief reports in “Notes on Science,” in The New York Times (August 17, 1952) : link (paywall), from which —
“According to Dr. Carl Strehl, vice president of the World Council for the Welfare of the Blind, the machine ‘represents a considerable advance over the work of its predecessors since it does not spell words but rather utters, in a comprehensible way, syllables and whole words and presents a synthetic language which may be readily learned by blind persons within a few days.’”
A Walter Blum is associated with several patents for photoelectric and other controls/devices, at around this time; none of these specifically concern optical character reading.
8 September 2025