August 23, 2009
James Marsters, Deaf Inventor, Dies at 85
By DENNIS HEVESI



Sign language, lip reading and speech training helped James Marsters get through college and dental school and made it possible for him to succeed as an orthodontist. He could communicate very well face to face.

But for most of his first 40 years, the telephone was a barrier.

"All of us in the family, whenever a call came for my dad," his son James Jr. said on Friday, "we picked up this handset attached to the phone so that we could listen in and relay to my father what the caller was saying. He would read our lips and then reply in his own voice."

Dr. Marsters and two deaf colleagues broke that barrier for themselves and tens of thousands of other hearing-impaired people in 1964 when they converted an old, bulky, clacking Teletype machine into a device that could relay a typewritten conversation through a telephone line. It was the first example of what became commonly known as a TTY and is now, in a greatly updated and compact version, called a text telephone.



Dr. Marsters died of natural causes at his home in Oakland, Calif., on July 28, his son said. He was 85.



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