Full Transcript
Pete:
Coming up on Blind Abilities today…
Michael:
That doesn’t mean that you still don’t get a chill down your spine when you’re in the presence of the Liberty Bell. You’ve just got to figure out a way to make it possible for everybody to have that chill run down their spine. My degree is in the history of technology, and so what APH is basically a big factory. I very quickly fell in love with the American Printing House for the Blind and its mission, and you know, it’s pretty rare where you work someplace that, you know, changes people’s lives.
Pete:
Meet Michael Hudson, director, Museum for the American Printing House for the Blind, a museum presenting the history of blindness and the role in that history played by the American Printing House for the Blind, a working factory producing products and materials…
Michael:
Full of conveyors and presses and ink and grease and paper. I don’t know if you ever remember a lady named Mitzi Friedlander. Mitzi would just bag her recording session, and would come out and say “Ha!”
Pete:
Evoking memories…
Michael:
We’re gonna be opening a new, wholly redone museum, and one big part of that experience is gonna be Helen and Annie.
Pete:
And emotions…
Michael:
Everything she wrote between 1948 and her death in 1968 was all written at that desk. We’ve had people come in and just put their hand on it and begin to weep, knowing that all the amazing work that she did was done right there at that desk.
Pete:
Making a difference…
Michael:
One of the things that we’ve been talking about a lot is what does beautiful sound like? What does beautiful feel like? So that we can create these kind of aha moments for people using other senses than just sight.
Pete:
Now please join Jeff Thompson and myself and our guest, Michael Hudson.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson.
Pete:
And I’m Pete Lane. Our guest today is Michael Hudson. Mike, welcome to Blind Abilities. How are you this morning?
Michael:
I’m great, glad to be here.
Pete:
Mike, you graduated from the University of Delaware with a master’s in the history of technology, and you’re now the director of the Museum for the American Printing House for the Blind, how in the world did your degree land you at the American Printing House for the Blind?
Michael:
Once I got out of college, UD is also a big museum studies school, so I have a certificate in museum studies. I went to work in Frankfurt, Kentucky, in the state capitol here, at the Kentucky Historical Society, and worked in collections for 18 years there. I was looking for another opportunity, and Carol Toby, who was the founding director of the American Printing for the Blind and museum here, had retired in 2005, and so that job came open, and I had been aware of the Printing House, I had actually come over here before they even opened the museum and kind of talked with Carol. I knew that everything was going on, but I knew nothing about blindness, I’ll say that. Nothing. I had one friend, a dear friend, who had lost her vision from diabetic retinopathy, but other than that, I was like most everybody else. Most sighted people, blissfully ignorant of what blindness was and what it meant to people. My degree’s in the history of technology and so what APH is is basically a big factory, goes back to 1858, so it’s full of conveyors and presses and ink and grease, and paper, and so very quickly I fell in love with the American Printing House for the Blind and its mission. You know, it’s pretty rare where you work someplace that, you know, changes people’s lives, and for a museum guy, you know, normally we’re all about stuff, so it was an opportunity to explore this really different material record that I had known nothing about and now I’m one of the experts on this stuff.
Jeff:
That really seems like something that fit what you went to school for, history of technology. And it really doesn’t matter what technology it was, you’re just curious.
Michael:
Yeah. Well, my friends and I who were in graduate school, we were all interested in rusty old things. Think about technology, how fast-moving our technological world is, you know, what is a marvel in your hand one day, the next day is a piece of junk you don’t even know how to get rid of, right? And that’s the way this stuff is, you know, we invent these amazing tools to do these amazing things, and then they’re junk. It’s people like me that have to kind of sift through that pile of junk and decide, I know this thing is one of the first digital braille embossers made by Tell Sensory.
Pete:
Yeah. So you’re a master in the history of junk.
Michael:
You could say that. You absolutely could say that. And a lot of times, you know, the difference between junk and good stuff if you want to think about it that way, is nice lighting, a nice fancy label, and a clever display.
Jeff:
Well, it’s really interesting, you know, when we come across one of the first OCR machines. The size of that thing was the size of a washing machine, and now-
Michael:
It’s in your pocket.
Pete:
Along with the hundred other machines.
Michael:
Yes. You’re basically talking about a Kurzweil readout machine, you know. A miracle of technology, it was so far ahead of its time, even, that Xerox bought out his company because they knew that there was an application for that technology.
Jeff:
In Ray’s lifetime, it must have been really neat for him to invent such a huge machine, but that’s what the technology allowed him to build, and to build it all the way to the software so it was in the phone.
Michael:
Think about all the things that are in your phone now. Your blind bat utility belt, you need, you know, this device to find the door, and this device to read a book, and this device to take some notes, and now-
Jeff:
Well, remember the GPSs that were in the backpack?
Michael:
Oh, I got one of those from Mike May.
Pete:
Right.
Jeff:
Mike, of course.
Michael:
During the COVID, he and one of his collaborators sent me one of those. It was just amazing how huge that thing is, and how quickly we went from basically looking like a man on the moon with a big backpack, with the antenna, I think there were three different navigation systems built into that system to something that’s on your phone and is using satellite technology and LiDAR and all this stuff. There is a principle, I can’t remember the name of it, about miniaturization, about every so many years, everything gets half the size, and that’s very much played out in terms of electronic travel aids for people that are blind and visually impaired.
Pete:
Will that GPS, that backpack device, fit into one of your exhibits in the museum?
Michael:
It’s hard to know, because here’s the question you gotta ask yourself, you know, as soon as I heard there’s a great YouTube video of Mike negotiating a city street, using that thing, his Sendero group, you know, blazed a lot of new ground, but you’ve gotta decide was it significant? When you look at these technological things, you’ve gotta decide was this just a curiosity or did it bear fruit? Was this the reason why we’re where we are today? Without that, could we have had this? But you know, one of the things that’s really cool that we have on display here is the 1959 World Book Encyclopedia.
Jeff:
Oh my gosh.
Michael:
The print version of the World Book, you know, basically took up, you know, one shelf on your bookshelf. And the braille version was 145 volumes, and if it falls over on you you’re a dead man. Takes up a lot of space. And yet all of that information, all of it, is available to you right now on your phone. So that- I think the comparison of the Sendero group, the backpack navigating unit to the thing the person might be using to navigate the museum at the same time, I think that is a great juxtaposition, to show how quickly we move. Think about magnifiers. We just got a magnifier donated to us, it’s called a PortaReader. Came from a company called something Laser Incorporated, anyways, it’s got a nice space age name, but this thing was supposed to be portable. It’s called the PortaReader. If toting around a big television with a big camera and a bunch of chrome plated stand units that all fold around that, if that’s portable, it’s like toting around a 50 pound bowling ball, but that was considered to be portable. And today, you know, APH and a bunch of companies have these portable video magnifiers that fold down into the size of a notebook, fits right in your backpack, battery powered, and it can do a lot more. That image, we can replicate it in every area. What about refreshable braille? The first really available refreshable braille display is from Paris, France, 1975, it’s this thing called the Digi-cassette. You used cassette tapes, audio cassette tapes, to store-
Pete:
Kind of like the Versabraille?
Michael:
Well, the Versabraille basically, it’s maybe another podcast, but they stole- Versabraille is basically, in my opinion, stolen from the Digi-cassette, because the guy who invented the Digi-cassette’s a guy named Oleg Tridiakov, and he comes over to the United States to try and get a partner to sell it in the United States, and Tell Sensory looks at it and goes hmm, well, we don’t think so, and a year later they come out with the Versabraille. Huh, funny, Versabraille also stores its data on audio cassettes, but yeah, it’s pretty heavy, and it’s a briefcase-sized device. Now you can get a refreshable braille display that, you know, you can stick in your pocket.
Jeff:
So, Mike, is the museum part of the Helen Keller Museum?
Michael:
The American Printing House for the Blind, where I work, was founded in 1858, opened its own museum in 1994, we always toured people through the building, you know, they go back through braille, go down to talking books, see the studio, in ‘94 we opened the museum. So I’m the director of the Museum for the American Printing House for the Blind. I started in 2005, and one of the things that I do is I go out and get stuff. That’s what I do, and so we’ve negotiated agreements with AER, the Catholic Guild in Boston, the BANA, Braille Authority of North America, and others, and most recently with AFB. When Helen and Annie, when both of them died, Helen died in ‘68, they left everything to AFB. AFB had all of her papers, and a lot of her personal possessions-
Jeff:
Her desk.
Michael:
Yeah! Which is, you know, maybe 10 feet away from me where I sit right now.
Jeff:
Are you serious?
Michael:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Did you hear about replicating the desk?
Michael:
You know, we had a guy, and I don’t remember his name, but he contacted me and got measurements, and pictures-
Jeff:
George Wurzel?
Michael:
Yes, yes!
Jeff:
Yeah, yeah, I’ve worked with George for quite a few years.
Michael:
Okay. So in January and February of 2020, okay, what a year, right? As the COVID was just coming onto our consciousness, myself and Justin Gardner who is our AFB Helen Keller archivist here at APH, we went up to New York, packed everything up, put it on two tractor trailers, and brought everything down here, so over the last going on two years, he and I have been working on cataloging it. The Helen Keller part of the collection is very well-cataloged. Helen Celson was the archivist there and she did a great job, but the AFB part of the archive was not really well-archived, and it’s just full of amazing stuff, you know, American Foundation for the Blind has just been involved in all kinds of things over the last 100 years. We’ve been working really hard on getting intellectual control over that collection, so we are the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind, and we now have the AFB Helen Keller archive here at APH.
Jeff:
So if you tour one you’re touring both, in a sense.
Michael:
Yes, although we didn’t have really any space for the Helen Keller part of the process, so we are in the midst right now of a big, huge project, literally to tear the whole front of our building off and build a new museum structure out in front, and actually put a whole new facade on our building. We’re gonna be opening a new, totally redone museum in probably 2024, that’s the goal, and one big part of that experience is gonna be Helen and Annie. You can’t talk about Helen without talking about Annie. Right now we’re located in, really, it’s one of my favorite spaces in the building, it’s the second floor of the original 1883 building, and the second floor of the 1883 annex. You’d have to have a PhD to figure it all out.
Pete:
Something like 280,000 square feet.
Michael:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. The 1883 building is wood. It’s cocooned inside of all those other structures.
Jeff:
You’re 10 feet away from her desk.
Michael:
Well, she and her assistant, Paulie Thompson, had gone to Europe after World War II to meet with the leaders of the various blindness organizations there and kind of assess the blindness field in Europe and how it had suffered or prospered during World War II, and while she’s there in 1947 her house in Connecticut burned down. Arcan Ridge. So her friends and AFB and family and stuff kind of came together to build a new house and furnish it, and so this desk is from about 1948, early 1948, it was made in New York in a New York furniture factory, it’s a big huge desk. But everything she wrote between 1948 and her death in 1968, which was a lot, was all written at that desk. We’ve had people come in and just put their hand on it and begin to weep, knowing that all the amazing work that she did was done right there at that desk.
Jeff:
Did GoodMaps map out something there?
Michael:
So GoodMaps is actually a fully owned subsidiary of APH, right, it started out as [unintelligible] Explorer, Indoor Explorer, and now GoodMaps, right, and yeah, they’re working on that. It will, we hope, be an integral part of navigating the new museum. Our number one goal- you see a lot of museums, they aspire to make their collections accessible. They’re gonna put together an exhibit, they do the exhibit, and then at the end they say how can we make this accessible. What we wanna do is bake accessibility for all kinds of people into our design before we put the shovel in the ground.
Jeff:
And by the way, sighted people might come through.
Michael:
And it turns out, this is kind of cool, I think, and maybe this is not intuitive to people, but when you make things accessible to everybody, you make them better for everybody. You know, there’s all kinds of people out there who don’t see that well, but they’d never admit it, and they don’t claim it. You know, if you make sure your fonts are nice and big, and you use really good, high contrast in your graphics, it makes it better for everybody. One of the really important things that we’re gonna be working on for the new museum is, and this is my term, I’m patenting it, trademarking it, so don’t go using it without express written permission of major league baseball-
Jeff:
We’ll keep it out.
Michael:
-but this is an uncluttered sonic landscape. Museums have all kinds of problems when it comes to giving a good experience for people that are blind and visually impaired, but one of the things that happens, all this audiovisual stuff, right, which is awesome, but it competes. You’ve got your air handling unit, you’ve got the school group that’s there, you’ve got like 60 of them and they’re all chattering, and then you’ve got all this A/V that’s competing. If you’re in there and you’re relying on your hearing for a lot of your experience, it’s very cluttered. That’s tiring, if you’re concentrating all the time to hear that one thing that you know you’re interested in.
Pete:
It’s like sitting in a crowded restaurant. There’s too much, you can’t decipher one voice from the other 50.
Michael:
And even when you can, what you’re doing is you’re concentrating hard to do that. It tires you out, it’s exhausting. You know, one of the things that we’ve been talking about a lot is what does beautiful sound like? What does beautiful feel like? So that we can create these kind of aha moments for people using other senses than just sight, although those’ll be there as well. How you do that, and you know, a lot of people talk about doing it, and we know that it’s gonna be a challenge. The point is that we’re gonna start out from the beginning with accessibility really as our number one goal.
Pete:
So Mike, take us on a brief tour of the museum. Give us a picture of what that would be like.
Michael:
Sure. Obviously, when you come, you also want to do a factory tour, ‘cause that takes you back into braille and down into the talking book studios, but then the museum itself, there’s two galleries. The first gallery basically is the history of APH decade by decade, we put as many things out to be touched as we can. Our labels are in large print and audio and braille. Wherever we’ve got something that’s too fragile to be touched, we try to put reproductions out so that you can get a sense of- like, for example, raised letter books, before we had braille books were embossed in raised letters, so those are too fragile to be touched, so we would put a reproduction so you get a sense of what the font felt like, what it would have been like to try to read using raised letters. And in some cases we just have real things out, like there’s a Hall braille writer out there, that’s the first successful mechanical braille writer, and so on. And some cases, we have cases that are under glass, but they open up for our blind or visually impaired visitors. So normally, you know, the sighted visitors, they just look and read the labels. But if you’re blind, you can actually lift a lid and reach down in there and touch the things. And then the second exhibit is basically our original exhibit that was installed in ‘94, and it’s more topical. It starts out with the first books and Louis Braille and Valentin Hauy, who founded the first school for people that are blind or visually impaired. And then it has sections on writing, so we have probably the best braille writer collection in the country, probably in the world. We have an outstanding slate collection, probably better than anybody’s but this lady that works at DNLS has a better slate collection. Then we have a section on talking books, we have a section on typewriting, which was really important in early schools for the blind. We have a section on those early schools. We have a lot of printing machinery to show you kind of the history of embossing books for people that are blind. We have Stevie Wonder’s piano. The Michigan School for the Blind-
Pete:
Yeah, I saw that.
Michael:
He was really saved by the Michigan School for the Blind. That’s another story for another podcast, but a good one. And we have lots of examples of different products for teaching geography and science and math, all the things that you have to learn in school. How did teachers and students and parents kind of collaborate to figure out what are the educational aids we need to help kids succeed at these classes? So that’s your experience.
Jeff:
When you’re talking about these archives and stuff, I was going through on my phone, I was just flipping to some of the, you know, Helen Keller pictures and other things. I saw this sign. I don’t know if it was Texas or someplace, but it was School for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind. They actually printed signs like that.
Michael:
I’ve got an actually more disturbing one for you. There were a number of states that had schools where all those three categories of kids, deaf, dumb and blind, were going, but there were other states that had schools like that, but they called them the such and such school for defective children. So we, we, big we, all of us, right? We are on this journey of discovery, if you want to think about it that way, but language is a big part of that journey we’ve gone through even in our own lifetimes, we’ve moved away from a word like handicapped. The general word we use now is disabled, disability, but it could be that in five or 10 years, we move away from disability to another word that is more, you know, useful to us. A lot of the residential schools for kids with disabilities have gone through a lot of incarnations. You know, it’s funny, on that topic, you know, for most of the people that I know who are blind or visually impaired, blindness has never been a bad word. And I don’t know what you all think about that.
Jeff:
No, it’s not four letters.
Michael:
It’s not, it’s just a descriptive word that describes vision loss, right? But you know, other groups of disability advocates and activists have struggled with the language that’s used to describe their particular abilities, like the mentally retarded were, you know. But, you know, for people that are blind, blind has been the word we’ve been using forever and it’s not considered to be pejorative.
Pete:
Yeah. Talk about the exhibit of the leaders and legends in the field of blindness.
Michael:
Sure, the Hall of Fame. It’s one of my favorite parts. The Hall of Fame was started in 2002. There were 40-some original people that were inducted into it. Today, there are almost 70.
Audio from Museum for the American Printing House of the Blind:
Today, we’re going to take you on a kind of informal tour of one of the most special places here at the American Printing House, the Hall of Fame, for leaders and legends of the blindness field. Come on, let’s go check it out. The members of the Hall of Fame are literally the giants of the field, the trailblazers, the pioneers, the teachers…
Michael:
It’s very particular to the field of blindness, but there is a bas-relief plaque of each one of the inductees. The original bas-relief is carved by a guy named Andrew Daikin who works in the APH model shop, and then there’s a company across the river in Indiana that does the casting part of it. And we have an induction ceremony every year in October. There’s a nomination process. Nominations are open right now, so if you go to aph.org, and find the Hall of Fame page, you’ll find the nomination process is there, so if you have a teacher, a mentor, an inventor, anybody that has anything to do with the blindness field and has made a major contribution to the lives of people that are blind or visually impaired, those are the people that are in the Hall of Fame, and your average, Joe, just walking in off the street, he’s going to recognize almost none of those people, because they’re so particular to the field, but you know, a good example would be this guy named Arnold Patts, ever heard of Arnold Patts? No. Arnold Patts is the guy who figured out in the 1940s and ‘50s, that oxygen in the incubators was causing retrolental fibroplasia. And there was this huge epidemic of kids who, maybe their life had been saved by those incubators, you know, they were premature or they needed oxygen, but there’s too much oxygen going into them and the oxygen itself was attacking the tissues of the eye. Arnold Patts is the guy who figured out that, so a big, a giant, right? A very important man, but outside the blindness field, totally unknown.
Pete:
I’m still focusing, Mike, on tours and exhibits. If we were to come to Louisville and request a guided tour, would we see the talking book studio and the history of talking books? What would we see?
Michael:
You would. Up in the museum we have a lot of the older equipment, right? So we have the Scully Record Lathe. So if you want to go through the whole history of talking books, I can do it, but that might be another podcast. But basically, you know, talking books are invented by the American Foundation for the Blind. Robert Irwin is their director and he’s not a very good braille reader. And so he’s fascinated with a lot of the technology that comes along. He’s the one that gets, you know, government support for talking books, makes sure that talking books are included in the Pratt-Smoot Act, so that the National Library Service is distributing them. He’s the one who figures out how to get funding to get the early photographs made and how to get them distributed. APH gets in on the act in 1936, we install our own recording studio and our own record pressing outfit. And so we have machines like the record lathe, basically when the narrator is in the soundproof booth, talking into a big microphone connected to a big bank of electronics, which is connected to this record lathe that heats a hot needle up and etches a groove into the acetate disc, right? You can get about 20 minutes of recorded material on the side of one of those discs. So you had to read for 20 minutes without making a mistake. So down in the studio, we also have an example of the record presses that were used to actually press the records. And we have examples of the various kinds of vinyl records and the stampers, the whole process of mass producing rigid vinyl records. And then later we produced these flexible records. Did you ever see one of those? Yeah. So it’s a cheap way to make a disposable publication like a magazine. So, you know, we went through all that in the 1970s and ‘80s, early ‘70s started messing around with cassettes, phonographs. We have a large collection of the talking books themselves on vinyl and flexible vinyl. And then we have a lot of cassette machines, and some of those were made by the federal government, through the WPA, during the depression, and some of them were manufactured by GE. Then there’s all kinds of adaptations to the cassette machines, you know, variable speed and tone control, and four tracks. So you can get a lot of material on the side of, again, you know, just kind of wandering through all this technological innovation. We made rigid vinyl records here at APH for about 50 years. We made audio cassettes for about 40 years. So these were really long-used technologies. And then in 2012, we switched over to the little flash drive cartridges. We never produced anything on CD because CDs are too easy to duplicate, and so you couldn’t protect the publisher from somebody copying a recorded book. We also have in the collection, we have the original recording studio table, the table that the microphone was set on, we have some examples of the early microphones that were used in the early recording studio. One of the coolest stops on our tour used to be the line where we duplicated those flash drive cartridges. I mean, it was really like something out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you know, it was all special built machinery. You know, the two little fingers that are on the mailing case, right, that snaps when you get your book in the mail on the flash drive cartridge. So we had a little machine that we just snap those two fingers open, open up the cartridge case. Yeah. And then an operator hand inserts the cartridge, and then the machine continues down the line and it closes the box and snaps those two fingers. And so the whole time when I have a tour in there, in my mind, I’m hearing, you know, oompa loompa doopity doo, you know, cause it was very, you know, Rube Goldberg I guess, would be the right way to put it. And there probably wasn’t a manufacturing line like that anywhere in the world, except here. Unfortunately we don’t do the flash drive cartridges anymore. We got out of that business and very quickly, I think, you know, we did rigid vinyl’s for a long time, we did cassettes for a long time, but the flash drive cartridge I think is going to be a real blip in the pan, and everybody’s just going to download their book.
Jeff:
I just want to say one thing about the cassettes. Flip the label over and insert [unintelligible]. Wait, did I turn it? Did I flip it? Those records back in those days were heavy. They were heavy. I collect 78 records and my trunk back in the day, they got full sometimes and it was crazy.
Michael:
Well, that was the whole problem with the 78. So Edison and Vince, basically the phonograph in 1877 or so, right, that’s when he gets his patents, and the material that they’re making those early records out of is a shellac, it’s very heavy, it’s very brittle and you can’t get very much material on the side because the grooves are pretty far apart.
Jeff:
And it’s spinning fast.
Michael:
Yeah. So the big innovation that the American Foundation for the Blind comes up with is the 33 and ⅓ RPM record and a record compound that was durable enough to be shipped through the mail.
Jeff:
Oh, wow.
Michael:
Yeah, because if you drop a 78, it’ll shatter. Yeah, but you can drop the early talking book records on the ground and not break them.
Pete:
You might break your foot.
Michael:
Well, you know, it’s funny, the first book that APH recorded in 1936 was Gulliver’s Travels. And we did not have a copy of that book. And I got a phone call, oh gosh, now about six or seven years ago from a guy in Colorado Springs, and somehow or other, when he was in high school, he had come into possession of this big stack of talking books. And in that stack, was Gulliver’s Travels. So I got all clever on myself and I thought we don’t want him shipping that record, right, it’s too precious. We can’t afford to have anything happen. I’m going to fly out there and I’m going to get it. I’m going to come and I’m going to fly right back, right. I fly out there. It turns out he doesn’t have one talking book, he’s got 15 talking books. Each one of these talking books is between 10 and 25 records. So now I’m in possession of somewhere in the range of 300 discs.
Jeff:
And about 300 pounds.
Michael:
So what I had done is I had taken a big suitcase with me and I thought to myself, with nothing in it. And I’m like, I’ll pack it all up really careful, and that’s how I’m going to bring it back. But that’s not how it worked out because it was way too heavy. Yeah. Yeah. Very poorly planned. So I ended up basically shipping the other 14 and just bringing Gulliver back in my hands, just carrying it.
Pete:
Did it make it intact?
Michael:
Absolutely. And in fact, we’ve digitized it now. It was our first book. It was recorded by this guy named Hugh Sutton, who was a radio personality in Louisville in the 1920s.
Jeff:
So can I go back to the 33 and ⅓? That was APH?
Michael:
No, no. That was AFB.
Jeff:
Oh, okay, that was AFB.
Michael:
AFB created an experimental lab. Originally, Irwin thought we’ll figure it all out and then we’ll go to General Electric, Edison Electric, Western Electric, and they’ll make the records for us, right? But none of those companies was interested in it because the market wasn’t big enough. It’s kind of similar to APH today. You know, we make all kinds of things for a really small group of people. So Irwin goes to Carnegie and gets a grant to create an experimental lab, and it’s the depression, right? It’s 1931, 1932. And so he’s able to get this incredible guy named Oscar Kleber, who had worked for all those other companies, but he never would have been available if it hadn’t been for the depression. So Kleber creates this lab. He’s the one who figures out the grooves and the record compound and the units and all that stuff, Kleber figures all that out. And here’s something else, when people, general people, think of record LPs, they think of what?
Pete:
Music.
Michael:
Music, but the recording industry, didn’t start putting music onto 33 and ⅓ LPs until the 1940s. And if you go online and just look up the history of the LP, you’ll see that the music industry thinks they invented them, but they were invented for talking books for blind readers in the 1930s.
Jeff:
And everyone says it was curve cuts that was the start of people using things that was designed for, like, wheelchairs.
Michael:
Yeah. There’s a lot of that because by and large, the sighted world is largely ignorant of, and I don’t mean that with any-
Pete:
Malice.
Michael:
You know, malice. Yeah. Thanks. That was great word. I just say that they exist in their own world. They don’t understand what people who are blind or visually impaired are capable of, what techniques they use to do the same things that sighted people do every day, they just do it a little bit differently.
Pete:
Right.
Jeff:
So you say that the museum is based on technology. Is there any like social movements, like the ADA? Is there anything on that?
Michael:
Not really.
Jeff:
Okay. I like the idea of the technology because, you know, we use technology today. It’s one of the biggest things, assistive technology is all the way through, you know, like pre-ETS, even seniors, they all want a little piece of it. But to see the mass of what it took to have a brailler, or I can’t imagine what the first embosser side looked like or sounded like.
Michael:
Yeah, they’re immense. And they’re not very interesting either. They’re just a big box.
Jeff:
What’s one of the first ones sound like? Have you heard it?
Michael:
None of ours are functional. None of our early ones. We have like the Blazie Blazer-
Jeff:
Blazie!
Pete:
We had those at my office.
Michael:
Did you? Well, you know, they’re basically dot matrix printers. So if you’ve ever heard a dot matrix printer, that’s basically what they sound like. And we’re not really super advanced beyond that. You know, we have heavier duty and faster braille embossers but they work pretty much the same as those.
Pete:
We had to invest as much on the soundproof covering on the embossers themselves to keep the sound down so others in the work area could work.
Michael:
Yeah, it’s pretty loud actually back in our braille floor. And then we have the presses that are actually using metal plates, still. Our big jobs. It’s pretty loud back there. When we do tours there, we have to use amplification.
Jeff:
Whereas at Blind Incorporated, they scheduled the embosser for strategic times of the day, because if your classroom was near it all you would hear is that [makes embosser sound].
Michael:
Well, you know, something that I miss actually is that last week, in fact, we moved the last clamshell press that we used here. You know, we hadn’t used it, I think since 2017, but when I got here, there were five of them at one point, and various times at APH there were more than 10 all working and these were ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, you know, they open their jaws, spread open the two-sided zinc embossing plate, and an operator would hand-insert a piece of paper into the jaws, and then they would slam shut.
Jeff:
Just like a letter press.
Michael:
They really were just letter presses that had been adapted for embossing, classic presses all of them. I think this one is from about 1920, you know, just really visceral when you’re standing there behind the press. Literally up in my office, which is in a totally different part of the plant, I could feel it through the floor. And now there’s no thunk, thunk, thunk. For us museum guys, the old machinery going away is, I always loved it, that we were still using this, you know, 100 year old piece of technology.
Jeff:
Tell us about the museum itself. You said it was built when?
Michael:
It opened in ‘94.
Jeff:
The building it’s in?
Michael:
It’s in the original 1883 building here at APH. APH was founded in 1858, but until 1883, we were actually next door in the basement of the Kentucky School for the Blind. Once the act to promote the education of the blind was passed in 1879, which kind of gave us, the company kind of this guaranteed bedrock funding, then we began to expand. We built our first building. The museum is in the original 1883 building, and then also extends off to the north in the 1923 annex. 14 different structures here at APH, all in Louisville.
Jeff:
So the, in the history of blind people, from the late 1800s, you guys did all the embossing.
Michael:
In the United States, it starts at Perkins. A guy named Samuel Gridley Howe is their legendary superintendent, and they have the first kind of regularly funded embossing press making books in raised letters. And then shortly thereafter, APH comes along in 1858.
Jeff:
But it was no accident. I mean, you’re right in the heart of it there in Kentucky.
Michael:
Yeah. You know, a lot of people wonder why are we in Kentucky? So there’s this guy named Dempsey Sherod. He graduates from the Mississippi School for the Blind. And so he’s been taught to read, but there’s not enough books. So Dempsey takes it on himself. He’s a bit of a promoter, a bit of a shyster and he starts traveling around the south, trying to interest Southern legislatures in creating a national printing house for the blind, and gets it chartered in Mississippi in 1857, and in Kentucky in 1858 and partners with the Kentucky School for the Blind to get the whole thing going, and that’s why we’re here.
Jeff:
So even with COVID and stuff, you’ve gone through little struggles with that, like everyone else in the world, but what’s it like if someone was coming down to Louisville?
Michael:
You know, yeah, it’s been a tough two years. We actually closed our doors to visitors from March of 2020 until July of 2021, last summer, we opened back up for visitors. Our visitation has been way down, as you can imagine, people being very careful, but we are open for tours. We do a drop-in tour of the factory at 10:00 and 2:00, Monday through Friday, and then the museum is open 8:30 to 4:30 Monday through Friday and 10:00 to 3:00 on Saturdays. And we just did an educational program on Saturday, doing- making tactile Valentine’s cards, had about 30 people over here for that. That was great, you know? Yeah, we do a lot of education programs. We’re kind of throwing spaghetti on the wall, trying to figure out what people want, but we do, you know, we do some crafts, some tactile craft things using tactile materials.
Jeff:
How can someone find out more about APH and the museum?
Michael:
We’re on the web. First thing, we have a Facebook page, a Twitter presence. That’s @APHMuseum, @APHMuseum. We post almost every day on both of those platforms. We put videos up and talk about stuff in the collection and talk about history and introduce you to a lot of interesting characters.
Pete:
Mystery devices?
Michael:
Yeah, we do a Mystery Monday object almost every Monday.
Mystery Monday audio:
Our mystery object today comes from APH’s long history of manufacturing talking books for people that are blind or visually impaired. So our object today is a large unused roll of flexible black vinyl. Flexible vinyl that was used to make flexible…
Michael:
If you’re into Facebook or Twitter, we’d like you to follow us there. We also have our website. That’s just APHmuseum.org, APHmuseum, all one word, dot org. We’ve got a lot of resources and things on there, and a lot of digital galleries like the narrator jukebox, so you can listen to little clips of a lot of our different narrators-
Museum audio:
-not looking for caricatures and doing voices. You’re doing characters. They will sound different because they are different characters, but don’t go over the top…
Pete:
Will we meet narrators if we come to the building, do they record in the studio?
Michael:
They do. You’re probably not going to meet one, ‘cause if they’re there, they’re in the studio and they’re reading. I don’t know if you ever remember a lady named Mitzi Friedlander-
Mitzi:
…was first performed in England at the Repertory Theater, Birmingham on 7 October 1916 with Gertrude Kingston as Ermintrude, Kathleen Orford as the princess, William Armstrong as the waiter. Noel Shaman as the hotel manager, Joseph…
Michael:
Mitzi, one of the great ladies of talking books, started reading for us in 1963, and she unfortunately passed last year. And we’re going to have kind of a memorial event for Mitzi coming up this March. And if Mitzi looked out, if you were wearing sunglasses or you had a dog, or you had a long cane, Mitzi would just bag her recording session and she would come out and say hi. She loved her fans. And she had a lot of them. She was one of the most- she read more talking books than any other narrator in the whole history of the program.
Pete:
What’s her tally up to do you know?
Michael:
It was over 2000. I don’t remember what it actually was, but that record will never be touched.
Pete:
That’s incredible.
Michael:
She read for forever. And in fact, you know, when she retired, I don’t think she ever really knew she was retired. I think she just thought she hadn’t been assigned any books that week, because she would have been back here in a heartbeat. She was a great, great-
Pete:
She was one of the longest I can remember, along with Martha Harmon Pardee, and Ray Foushee.
Michael:
And Ray’s still reading.
Ray:
…side one, Double Deuce by Robert B. Parker, narrated by Ray Foushee. This book contains 224 pages on five sides. Annotation. Hawk has been hired by the residents of Double Deuce…
Pete:
Incredible. I’m just wondering, do you hire? If any of our listening audience are in the braille transcription business, how would that work and how often?
Michael:
I’m going to look that up real quick, ‘cause we just got an email on that, but we have more than 330 employees working for us. And so we’re constantly hiring and in fact, just like everybody else, we can’t fill all our positions. So there are a lot of jobs open right now. And the APH careers portal, if you just type in APH careers portal into your Google search engine, I think it’ll come up. If not, call APH and ask to talk to our HR department, and they can get you to that website because all the open positions are listed there, and I’m looking at it right now. And for instance, we have 11 positions that are open right now, and one of them is for a certified braille transcriber. That’s not usual. You know, usually APH has just been such a great place to work that people work here for 30, 40, 50 years, their entire career.
Pete:
And they can remain in their current location and work remotely?
Michael:
They can, we’re changing as times change. We’ve had to be flexible with this COVID thing. You know, my boss, Paul Schrader, works out of Washington DC.
Pete:
Michael, one more question, more on a personal level. My sister is a docent in western Massachusetts in Holyoke at the art museum. And she’s asking me for tips and ideas on how to adapt her tour, or how can the museum create tours that are accessible from the get-go. Do you do any consulting with other museums in that area? Talk about that if you don’t mind.
Michael:
Sure. Our idea is predicated on talking to people that are blind or visually impaired. So my advice is first off, work with the blindness organizations in your area, and there’s going to be plenty in the Holyoke area, to find some people that love your museum and the topic that your museum covers. You’re going to find some people in the Holyoak area, just to use them, as an example that love art and love the kind of art that’s collected by that museum. So you start with people that already want to love you, then bring them in, create your little group, four or five people, try to get a good group where you’ve got some people that use canes, some people that use dogs, and some people that are low vision. And just take them on a tour, the standard tour, the same tour that you give everybody else, then sit down afterwards and talk to them about what they liked and what they didn’t like, what was good and what was bad. Out of that conversation with those folks, you’ll start to realize what people want. So many people think that accessibility is like something you can just order on Amazon. Like it’s a checklist, you order the book and you follow the checklist and now you’re accessible. But what you should start with is people that already want to enjoy the topics that you cover. Start with those people and figure out what they want, ask them what they want. You’re going to find out that it’s things like adding a basket full of tactiles that you can carry with you on the tour, so if you’re looking at a portrait of a lady in the 19th century, you’re describing her, first off, you’d get your guides trained in doing audio descriptions. As you’re talking about her dress, you’re handing them a piece of silk, so that they get a sense of how that dress feels. If you’re in the kitchen of a historic house, are there some things in there that can be smelled, touched or manipulated? Are there reproductions that you can use as part of your tour and so on and so forth. Then you start to make some changes to your gallery, but you start with people who are blind or vision impaired, or people who are Deaf, or people who are in a particular community that you want to serve and figure out what they want. And we call that “Just ask.” You guys both know that there are plenty of people out there waiting to tell you, right?
Pete:
Of course.
Michael:
Yeah. They just want to be asked.
Pete:
Good advice. I appreciate that. Jeff, anything else from you?
Jeff:
No, that’s really good advice. I see your passion on making things accessible to people, especially coming in on a tour, wanting to gain that data that’s there and be able to perceive it in a way that they can walk away learning. You seem like the right guy for the job.
Michael:
Museums arrange encounters with the authentic. There are barriers to that encounter, and we’ve got to figure out how to blow those barriers away, but that doesn’t mean that you still don’t get a chill down your spine when you’re in the presence of the Liberty Bell, or you’re in a room where something happened that was significant that you care about. Those are significant moments. We’ve just got to figure out a way to make it possible for everybody to have that chill run down their spine. That’s the challenge. And it’s gotta be a two-way conversation between audience and the people delivering the program.
Jeff:
Thank you very much, Mike.
Pete:
It’s been fascinating.
Michael:
You’re welcome. When are you guys coming?
Jeff:
You know, I always thought about it, but now after talking to you, you’ve turned me on to it. I want the experience.
Pete:
Absolutely.
Jeff:
I want the experience.
Michael:
Yeah. And you can tell I’ve got a million stories, so anytime you want to talk about something else I’m available.
Pete:
Yeah, I think you pointed out topics for another half dozen podcasts.
Michael:
Well you just keep peeling the onion. You know, you would think it would be a narrow little story, but it’s not. There’s a lot of things going on in the story.
Pete:
We’ve been speaking with Michael Hudson. Mike is the current director of the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind located in Louisville, Kentucky. Since 2005 you’ve been in this position and you’ve obviously gained a ton of expertise, and we want to thank you for sharing that with us today, Mike.
Michael:
Thanks guys. I really enjoyed talking to you.
Pete:
Our pleasure.
Jeff:
Alright, Mike!
Pete:
Thanks again.
[all three making the sounds of an embosser]
Pete:
This concludes our chat with Michael Hudson, Director of the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind. We’d like to thank Mike for joining us in the Blind Abilities studio today. And remember, you can find out everything you need to know on the APH museum website and that’s APHmuseum.o-r-g. Be sure to check out their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
And by all means, take a look at their YouTube channel. That’s APH Museum. And finally, we’d like to thank Chee Chau for his beautiful music. Thanks so much for listening and have a great day.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
For more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, download our app from the app store, blind abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
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