Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. You know what, I am
Speaker 1: excited today because I feel like this episode of Invention
Speaker 1: is going to be something that I haven't I haven't
Speaker 1: fully dealt with yet, which is an invention that I
Speaker 1: can't really find a bad angle on. But I feel
Speaker 1: like today we're gonna be talking about an invention that
Speaker 1: I think is just pretty great. Yeah, we're talking about Brail.
Speaker 1: Brail the writing system based on tactile sensations for people
Speaker 1: who are blind or otherwise visually impaired. So it's a
Speaker 1: writing system, yeah, it's and it's It is hard to
Speaker 1: imagine Brail being used for evil, except in the sense
Speaker 1: that all writing systems could be used for evil. So
Speaker 1: I guess you could. Somebody could write something mean or
Speaker 1: you know, outright dangerous in Brail in the same way
Speaker 1: the one could do that in any full of written communication. Yes,
Speaker 1: but I would say as a modification and expansion of
Speaker 1: an existing writing system, and of course writing comes with
Speaker 1: all that writing can do, I'd say it's just a
Speaker 1: good thing to have. Yeah, And they didn't start the
Speaker 1: fire right there, it's a continuation of existing written language technology.
Speaker 1: So whatever was already bad or dangerous in the written
Speaker 1: word was already there, and and this is not necessarily
Speaker 1: adding anything new to it in that regard. So written
Speaker 1: language is something that we might not often think about
Speaker 1: as an invention, but I think it's actually one of
Speaker 1: the most important inventions to consider. Oh yeah, we've talked
Speaker 1: about this a good bit on stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind in the past. But but what he is language
Speaker 1: but the power to take words and thoughts and fix
Speaker 1: them in place, to record them and create complex forms
Speaker 1: out of their structure. And then one can simply come along,
Speaker 1: read the words and hear those words in your mind,
Speaker 1: think those thoughts for yourself. So when when it's it's
Speaker 1: crazy to think about this is sort of deconstructed and
Speaker 1: realize that when we read the words of a long
Speaker 1: dead thinker, we are reading we are loading their thoughts
Speaker 1: into our mind and thinking with their thoughts. You're going
Speaker 1: into the matrix, you're uploading their thoughts. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: not exactly, because you're probably reading across the translation gap
Speaker 1: and there's something like that, but I mean reading the
Speaker 1: words written by another person. I feel like is is
Speaker 1: about as close as you can get to just mind,
Speaker 1: you know, mind reading. Yeah. I was thinking about this
Speaker 1: too with translation the other day, Like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I wonder, what are what are the oldest words that
Speaker 1: I've read that I can actually you know, get the
Speaker 1: gist out of. It's not too archaic and it's a formation. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean probably, I mean certainly probably something in Old
Speaker 1: English passages and Bayowolf you can kind of get the
Speaker 1: sense of. But those are cases where even though there's
Speaker 1: you know, maybe a little distortion, uh, you know, a
Speaker 1: little static from all those century is of linguistic shift,
Speaker 1: but but you're you're still feeling those thoughts, you're still
Speaker 1: thinking those thoughts from another time. Writing is the time
Speaker 1: machine exactly. Now. While spoken languages auditory, obviously, written language
Speaker 1: is a visual system, and for the blind or visually impaired,
Speaker 1: written language is going to be rather lacking obviously. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just strokes on a page are going to be difficult,
Speaker 1: if not impossible, to read. And I would say, because
Speaker 1: education is so often tied up in literacy throughout much
Speaker 1: of human history and lots of cultures, I think this
Speaker 1: has led to a kind of unfair and dismissive under
Speaker 1: consideration of the role of the education of the blind,
Speaker 1: because it's like, well, they can't read the written texts
Speaker 1: we have, so what, you know, what can we really
Speaker 1: teach them? Yeah, it wasn't until seventeen eighty four that
Speaker 1: school for the blind was established in France and then
Speaker 1: the concept spread throughout Europe. But but prior to that,
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly, if you go back to the ancient
Speaker 1: world and prehistoric times you had this is sort of
Speaker 1: the varying levels of of importance or or attention paid
Speaker 1: to the blind or visually impaired individuals, especially individuals who
Speaker 1: who were born visually impaired or without the ability to see.
Speaker 1: You go back to prehistoric civil civilizations and they might
Speaker 1: have had a practice of disposing of such individuals um likewise,
Speaker 1: throughout you know, the ancient world, you see sort of
Speaker 1: varying treatment. Right, there are times where a blind individual
Speaker 1: is elevated, that is celebrated. Plenty of other blind or
Speaker 1: visual impaired individuals who are just simply lost to history.
Speaker 1: But you know, you think about say Homer, uh the
Speaker 1: you know, the famous Greek storyteller. Whether or not this
Speaker 1: was an actual historic individual, many of the the accounts
Speaker 1: say that that that he was blind, and so on
Speaker 1: one hand, if this was an actual blind storyteller, there
Speaker 1: you know there's a there's a lot to be inferred
Speaker 1: from that. But but then at the same time, there
Speaker 1: there is this tendency in human history to take individuals
Speaker 1: that that are notable in some sort of disfigurement or
Speaker 1: a difference in ability, or even something like twins, and
Speaker 1: what they end up being is not not really a
Speaker 1: treatment of individuals with those conditions, but symbols for other
Speaker 1: people to interpret. It's like when you look at movies
Speaker 1: about twins or stories about twins, it's very often something
Speaker 1: created by uh Singleton's by individuals who do not have
Speaker 1: a twin, who are finding something in it in this
Speaker 1: situation to speak to their own identity, to be a metaphor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that's exactly correct. I mean, you see
Speaker 1: characters in you brought up Homer, but I think about
Speaker 1: like the legendary character of Tyreseius, the blind prophet, which
Speaker 1: I think is very often deployed by cited people as
Speaker 1: sort of like a metaphor or a symbol or something
Speaker 1: like that. Right, So you see this trend without going
Speaker 1: just really deep into sort of the history of blindness
Speaker 1: in human societies. But but very often the blind were
Speaker 1: treated as metaphors as and and and they certainly lacked
Speaker 1: any kind of like large scale, you know, communal experience,
Speaker 1: Like the blind were not able to come together across
Speaker 1: cultures and do things like develop their own system of
Speaker 1: written language. And certainly you didn't have any real efforts
Speaker 1: to make the cited world more accessible to sightless individuals.
Speaker 1: You know, an individual might well be able to depend
Speaker 1: on a family or a subordinate for aid in reading.
Speaker 1: And as early as Greek and Roman times, some individuals
Speaker 1: had access to lenses to aid them in reading. And
Speaker 1: of course we'll have to come back into a future
Speaker 1: episode of invention on that. But while the written word
Speaker 1: might be tactile in some cases due to the way
Speaker 1: that it's carved in stone or the way that it's
Speaker 1: you know, created using a stylus and wax, this was
Speaker 1: not the primary desired effect of those systems. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: now I mean, now that we live in a modern
Speaker 1: world where we are aware of the concept of brail,
Speaker 1: you might not understand its history or exactly how it
Speaker 1: was invented or how it works. Hopefully you will know
Speaker 1: something about that at the end of this episode, but
Speaker 1: you're aware of the fact that it exists before that.
Speaker 1: It's it's hard to imagine that there would not be
Speaker 1: some kind of widespread reading system within languages for people
Speaker 1: who are blind or visually impaired. But throughout history that
Speaker 1: just generally was the case. But we should also say
Speaker 1: that Brail as it's known today was not the first
Speaker 1: system of tactually encoding written language for the blind. That's right.
Speaker 1: For instance, there was an English system created by Dr
Speaker 1: William Moon, invented in eighteen forty five, moon Type, which
Speaker 1: sounds wonderfully Elvin, uh, you know, like like some sort
Speaker 1: of Elvin script that comes to life in the moonlight
Speaker 1: or something. But it was just named because that was
Speaker 1: a name. But it was basically a font type that
Speaker 1: is embossed and can be felt. And this wasn't even
Speaker 1: the first such type. There was. Valentine we Uh presented
Speaker 1: a version of this in the seventeen eighties. And again
Speaker 1: the simple concept here is UH existing fonts like aes
Speaker 1: B ces ds that you can that you can trace
Speaker 1: with your fingers, that you can touch and identify. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's an a this is a B, this is the c. Etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Hui system consisted of these embossed letters, and it was
Speaker 1: in fact somewhat useful for blind students like Louis Braille,
Speaker 1: who we will talk about in this episode as the
Speaker 1: inventor of Braille, learned to read with Hoi's system before
Speaker 1: he invented Braille based on another system we'll talk about
Speaker 1: in a bit, but it was the system of embossed letters,
Speaker 1: where like a normal letter, as you're saying, would be
Speaker 1: pressed through on a damp piece of paper and it
Speaker 1: would leave a print there that you could feel with
Speaker 1: your hand. But it had these real limitations, like to
Speaker 1: hold to this size of type, the books of print
Speaker 1: had to be huge and monstrously heavy, like I've seen
Speaker 1: estimates of an average of four point five kims about
Speaker 1: ten pounds per book, which is too heavy to hold
Speaker 1: and carry around in a practical way, especially for a
Speaker 1: child who's learning to read. But beyond that, there's just
Speaker 1: a reality that embossed alphabetic letters are hard to read
Speaker 1: by touch. And this is something that might not be
Speaker 1: obvious to cited readers. You just like look at them
Speaker 1: and say, well, they look different to me. I can
Speaker 1: tell the difference, but reading with your fingers is a
Speaker 1: different type of sensation activity than reading with your eyes is.
Speaker 1: And and it just turned out that for many blind
Speaker 1: students there was a lot of ambiguity in the shapes
Speaker 1: of letters. You could be trying to read across the line.
Speaker 1: And number one, it wasn't very fast because the letters
Speaker 1: were big and you have to sort of like feel
Speaker 1: around on each one. You couldn't just run your finger
Speaker 1: across the line. But then beyond that, there's ambiguity between letters,
Speaker 1: like a C might feel a lot like a G
Speaker 1: and all that, and it would take you a minute
Speaker 1: to figure out the difference. And this made reading slow
Speaker 1: and laborious. I feel like there's something probably revealing in
Speaker 1: this this journey thus far. You know, we've we've talked
Speaker 1: about the roles or the interpretations of of of blind
Speaker 1: and vision impaired individuals throughout history, and and here with
Speaker 1: these these systems, they do seem like a sided world
Speaker 1: first technology. Absolutely, yeah, it's blind or vision impaired individuals
Speaker 1: who will make some of the the key breakthroughs here.
Speaker 1: That's absolutely right. And at the same time, I don't
Speaker 1: want to downplay, uh, like who's contribution, like this was
Speaker 1: a real invention, this idea of the embost letters. It
Speaker 1: was better than nothing. And I think it's clear that
Speaker 1: who he was well meaning. Oh yeah, because it is
Speaker 1: easy to take for granted and speaking here as a
Speaker 1: sided individual, to take for granted the degree to which
Speaker 1: we rely on site and and and and use that
Speaker 1: as our key means of interpreting the world, but also
Speaker 1: not to realize how much you're not getting about other
Speaker 1: people's experiences, like if you haven't experienced it yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is This is certainly an area as we continue
Speaker 1: on in the episode, I imagine we have some listeners
Speaker 1: out there who who are blind or vision impaired in
Speaker 1: one way, shape or another. We would love to hear
Speaker 1: your feedback on on Brail on the experiences we're discussing
Speaker 1: in this episode totally. And one more thing I just
Speaker 1: realized about we should mention about the Hui system is uh.
Speaker 1: I hope I'm saying his name right. It's I was
Speaker 1: trying to look up how to pronounce this one. It's
Speaker 1: h a u y and I could not find I
Speaker 1: think it's Hui. That's my best guess. So if you're
Speaker 1: a French speaker out there, and you're grimacing every time
Speaker 1: we do this. This won't be the last time in
Speaker 1: the episode encounter difficult French names. All apologies, but yeah,
Speaker 1: So another thing about his system is that it's probably
Speaker 1: also easier to use this system if you are an
Speaker 1: adult who is used to reading printed letters and then
Speaker 1: lost their site later on in life, and you can
Speaker 1: feel around on those letters. Then if you're a child
Speaker 1: who has who has never learned to read printed letters,
Speaker 1: and you could perhaps be learning a tactle system that's
Speaker 1: much easier to pick up from the beginning. But we'll
Speaker 1: come back to this, says I think we should. We
Speaker 1: should move now to talk about something called night writing.
Speaker 1: Are you ready for night writing? Yeah? It sounds great.
Speaker 1: It sounds like like a ninet eighties horror film that
Speaker 1: I could really get into, like night Gallery, Night Gallery
Speaker 1: with a little like night gallery meets automatic writing meets uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a little night cheese in there. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess it also, Yeah, working on my night Cheese. I
Speaker 1: just know someday we're gonna get sued because we do
Speaker 1: a version of Working on My Night moves, and we're
Speaker 1: not gonna We're not gonna remember that edited out better.
Speaker 1: This is night writing. So you might have heard or
Speaker 1: remember from history classes that the design and tactics of
Speaker 1: mobile artillery were important to the success of Napoleon's military
Speaker 1: campaigns in the early nineteenth century. And Napoleon himself had
Speaker 1: been an artillery officer when he was coming up through
Speaker 1: the ranks. And another artillery officer in Napoleon's army would
Speaker 1: end up playing an important role in the creation of
Speaker 1: the modern Brail writing system, and this man was Nicholas
Speaker 1: Marie Charles Barbier de Lasayer, often shortened to just Charles
Speaker 1: Charles or Charles Barbier. And one good source I found
Speaker 1: that included stuff about the life of Charles Barbier was
Speaker 1: a book called Louis Braile A Touch of Genius by C.
Speaker 1: Michael Mallore from National Braille Press in two thousand six.
Speaker 1: So Barbier was born on May eighteen, seventeen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: and he was born into an aristocratic family, not like
Speaker 1: galactic scale big wigs, but like minor big wigs, medium wigs,
Speaker 1: and he went to a military school to become an
Speaker 1: army officer, but then the French Revolution broke out and
Speaker 1: he being a son of a minor aristocratic family, he
Speaker 1: fled to America and worked there for several years as
Speaker 1: a surveyor, and while in the United States, supposedly Barbiea
Speaker 1: became very interested in the writing systems that were being
Speaker 1: used by Native American tribes to to create codes for
Speaker 1: their languages, and barbie A at one point wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: of all the inventions honoring the human spirit, writing has
Speaker 1: contributed most to its development and progress. So this guy
Speaker 1: is a fan of the printed word. But barbie A
Speaker 1: later returned to France and served in the army, and
Speaker 1: from his interest in the creation of writing systems which
Speaker 1: she had sort of gained while he was in the
Speaker 1: United States, Barbiea developed an idea for a code that
Speaker 1: could be useful in wartime, and this code was called
Speaker 1: night writing. Now, imagine you're outdoing maneuvers under the cover
Speaker 1: of darkness. Maybe you want to put some mobile artillery
Speaker 1: in place without the enemy noticing what you're doing in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night. Now, you want to be
Speaker 1: able to send a written message from one group or
Speaker 1: station to the to another. And normally, if you send
Speaker 1: a written message during night maneuvers, the person receiving the
Speaker 1: message would have to light a torch or a lantern
Speaker 1: in order to read it, but that might give away
Speaker 1: your position to the enemy if you suddenly light a
Speaker 1: fire in the middle of a dark battlefield and then
Speaker 1: maybe some shells come raining down on you. So Barbie's
Speaker 1: idea was to use a system of holes punched into
Speaker 1: a piece of cardboard which could be read in total
Speaker 1: darkness because you could feel the symbols of the message
Speaker 1: with your fingers, allowing you to read it without a
Speaker 1: light and without giving away your position to the enemy.
Speaker 1: So Barbie has got this great idea. He's like, I'm
Speaker 1: going to change how how night moves are done. Um,
Speaker 1: he's working on his night moves and he presents this
Speaker 1: this idea of night riding to the military leadership. But
Speaker 1: apparently they're just not impressed. And I don't honestly know
Speaker 1: the reason why they rejected his idea, But if I
Speaker 1: had to guess, I would think one obstacle would be
Speaker 1: that this code would take time and effort for people
Speaker 1: to learn, and wouldn't necessarily be worth trying to make
Speaker 1: everybody learn when you also had the option of just
Speaker 1: transmitting message is by whisper in the dark. You could
Speaker 1: send a human messenger to tell somebody something and they
Speaker 1: could whisper it in their ear. That probably wouldn't give
Speaker 1: much away, right, And then it also stands to reason
Speaker 1: that in some cases you would be able to deploy
Speaker 1: some sort of light and do so in a way
Speaker 1: that would not necessarily give away your position. And we
Speaker 1: wouldn't require you to have learned to call a code
Speaker 1: and utilize some sort of a punch language, maybe under
Speaker 1: a blanket or something like. It's it's a it's an
Speaker 1: eloquent solution for a problem that maybe did not call
Speaker 1: for so eloquent a solution. That's possible. But even though
Speaker 1: he got rejected owned by the way, Robert, I've included
Speaker 1: a picture of Barbie a here, who, for some reason
Speaker 1: just really kind of reminds me of the way Xander
Speaker 1: Berkeley looks in Terminator to wait, remind me of which
Speaker 1: character Xander Berkeley was. He's John Connor's foster dad. You
Speaker 1: remember him. He's drinking the milk carton. Oh, yes, vaguely. Yes.
Speaker 1: The two one thousand gets him, Yeah, two one tho
Speaker 1: gets most people in that movie. Maybe it's a spurious comparison,
Speaker 1: I see it, But Anyway, Barbie was not finished with
Speaker 1: the idea of night writing, even though it got rejected
Speaker 1: by the military. Um. While I would say there are
Speaker 1: some pretty obvious alternatives to night writing, when it comes
Speaker 1: to transmitting short messages on a dark and battlefield, it
Speaker 1: becomes a lot harder to come up with ways of
Speaker 1: like reading longer messages, like say, entire books in the dark,
Speaker 1: And so by eighteen fifteen, Barbier had developed another idea.
Speaker 1: His idea was that the night writing system would be
Speaker 1: useful to the blind, especially as written by Barbie and
Speaker 1: quoted in Melore's book, quote to those born blind who
Speaker 1: are deprived of the means of ever being able to
Speaker 1: read our books or our writing. And besides this meeting
Speaker 1: with the greatest difficulties in correctly tracing the outlines of letters.
Speaker 1: So he he knew something about this problem, like the
Speaker 1: idea that uh blind people trying to read with with
Speaker 1: embossed letters of a normal alphabetics ripped faced problems like it.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't as easy as cited people thought it
Speaker 1: should be to feel a letter with your fingers and
Speaker 1: instantly know what it is certainly, and if you're doubtful
Speaker 1: of this the next time you go to say, a cemetery,
Speaker 1: or you're around some sort of you know, statue that
Speaker 1: you are permitted to touch and paw at um. Try
Speaker 1: it out and see how fast you can get. You
Speaker 1: see if you can hit, how much you can read.
Speaker 1: And it turns out Barbie was really onto something here.
Speaker 1: He created what turned out to be a very important
Speaker 1: precursor to the later system of Braille, though he is
Speaker 1: not known as its inventor. That title, of course goes
Speaker 1: to its namesake, Uh, the namesake of the writing system,
Speaker 1: Louis Braille. So I think maybe we should take a
Speaker 1: quick break and then we'll come back to meet Louis Braille. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, So let's talk about Louis Braille. We haveved
Speaker 1: eighteen o nine through eighteen fifty two. So he was
Speaker 1: he was a frenchman. Um would later grow to be
Speaker 1: a French educator. But as a as a child, at
Speaker 1: the mere age of three, uh, he was he was blinded.
Speaker 1: So what happened is his father was a harness maker,
Speaker 1: and he'd been playing with tools in his father's shop
Speaker 1: and a tool slipped in his hand and injured his
Speaker 1: right eye. Yeah, so this was in the commune of
Speaker 1: Kubra and his father, Like you said, it's like, I
Speaker 1: think he made a saddles and stuff and harnesses. And
Speaker 1: so if you're a harness maker, saddle maker, you have
Speaker 1: to use a sharp tool called an owl to punch
Speaker 1: holes in tough leather. And apparently young Louis was trying
Speaker 1: to punch a hole in leather with the awl when
Speaker 1: he accidentally slipped and he stabbed himself in the right eye.
Speaker 1: And uh, I've read that the remedy prescribed by a
Speaker 1: local healer was an infusion of something called lily water.
Speaker 1: I was looking to try to figure out what this is.
Speaker 1: I couldn't find a lot of other stuff about it,
Speaker 1: but I assume that might be I don't know, water
Speaker 1: that has been soaked with lilies or something. But anyway,
Speaker 1: it's possible this may have made the risk of infection
Speaker 1: even were the stabed. I of course became infected and
Speaker 1: then it got worse. Yeah. What resulted was something known
Speaker 1: as symp sympathetic ophthalmia, which is an infection of both
Speaker 1: eyes following trauma to a single eye, and this ultimately
Speaker 1: resulted in total blindness. His eyes deteriorated over time and
Speaker 1: he was totally blind by five. And this is particularly
Speaker 1: devastating when you think about the age at which most
Speaker 1: of us begin to acquire language, written language, you know,
Speaker 1: to to be robbed of your your your visual faculties
Speaker 1: at age between the ages of three and five, that's
Speaker 1: that's devastating. Yeah. And of course this, uh, this led
Speaker 1: to Braile's parents trying to get him enrolled in a
Speaker 1: in an institute or or a school for blind children.
Speaker 1: And he eventually was. Yeah, and as we mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: you know, he was he was lucky enough to have
Speaker 1: been born in the right time, in the right place
Speaker 1: to have access to one of these, uh, one of
Speaker 1: the really the earliest school for the blind, and it
Speaker 1: was at this this instant, the National Institute or the
Speaker 1: Royal Institute for Blind Children in Paris, where I think
Speaker 1: it went through some some different leadership. Um he uh.
Speaker 1: He first encountered the night writing system of Charles Barbier,
Speaker 1: though this, uh, this wouldn't happen until later. Barbier actually
Speaker 1: approached the institute multiple times with his invention, and the
Speaker 1: first time was in eighteen twenty. And so I guess
Speaker 1: we should back up for a second. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much you came across this, But in a lot
Speaker 1: of the biographical writing about Louis Braille there tends to
Speaker 1: be a kind of villain of the story by the
Speaker 1: name of Sebastian Galie. Well, that's a great villain's name,
Speaker 1: I guess, so I again, That's what I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I'm saying, right? Is g U I L L I
Speaker 1: E Gali? I think? And Gilly was head of the
Speaker 1: institute when Braille was first enrolled there as a child,
Speaker 1: and at that time conditions at the institute were in
Speaker 1: many ways just pretty awful, like the building was described
Speaker 1: as damp and poorly ventilated, there was dirty drinking water
Speaker 1: with few amenities, and Gilly apparently had a very prejudiced
Speaker 1: and condescending view toward the blind children that he was
Speaker 1: supposed to educate. As quoted in Millard's book. Gilly wrote
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighteen that he believed quote it has been
Speaker 1: clearly shown that the blind are not like other people,
Speaker 1: susceptible to being restrained by external demonstrations. The blind appreciate
Speaker 1: things only by extremes and can understand justice only by
Speaker 1: its effects. A paternal and just management has thus replaced
Speaker 1: the flexible and weak regime that has for so long
Speaker 1: prevented good from being done. All right, so that well,
Speaker 1: that sounds that sounds horrible, and and it and it continues,
Speaker 1: you know, a pre existing trend of treating the disabled
Speaker 1: as as something less than than human in some cases,
Speaker 1: or at least you know, as a as a secondary class. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and and this did appear to be Gilly's view. So
Speaker 1: he enacted harsh punishments on the children, including putting them
Speaker 1: on a diet of dry bread and water, with physical
Speaker 1: beatings or whippings, confinement in some extreme cases, even chaining
Speaker 1: children to a post. Uh And many of the children
Speaker 1: in the school when when new leadership came to power,
Speaker 1: they were later found to be malnourished and in poor health.
Speaker 1: There's an extremely hard to read an egregious case where
Speaker 1: Gale actually performed medical experiments on his blind students. Uh So.
Speaker 1: There was one case where he took fluid from the
Speaker 1: eyes of children suffering from a form of LaFaro blinaria,
Speaker 1: which is an eye infection resulting in discharge from the eyes,
Speaker 1: and he put it into the eyes of four blind
Speaker 1: children under his care at the school in order to
Speaker 1: test how it was transmitted, and his reasoning was that
Speaker 1: because they were already blind, they would not be risk
Speaker 1: of them losing their sight from the infection. Uh, though
Speaker 1: the records of the experiment indicate that the infection was
Speaker 1: extremely painful to the Children's a horrible story. But day
Speaker 1: to day at the school, the students were taught to
Speaker 1: do things like like weaving and tactle manual tasks, uh,
Speaker 1: weaving straw and rush mats and doing other kinds of
Speaker 1: jobs like that. But they also had opportunities to like
Speaker 1: learn and perform music, which Braile actually excelled at. He
Speaker 1: was said to be an extremely talented musician. So this
Speaker 1: is the guy who was in charge when Barbier first
Speaker 1: brought his night writing to the school. Yeah. So Barbier
Speaker 1: first shows up at the school in eighteen twenty and
Speaker 1: he tries to demonstrate to Gilly how a variation on
Speaker 1: the night writing system could be a useful alternative to
Speaker 1: the embossed print system that the students were using, and
Speaker 1: he showed off a writing device that he created that
Speaker 1: consisted of a type of slate and a stylus, and
Speaker 1: Gilly allowed the students to experiment with this briefly, but
Speaker 1: personally he did not seem to see much use in
Speaker 1: the system, and he passed on it. But soon after that,
Speaker 1: Gilly was dismissed from his position at the head of
Speaker 1: the institute after it was exposed that he had had
Speaker 1: an affair with a much younger instructor at the school,
Speaker 1: and Gilly's replacement a man named Andre or Alexandre Pinier,
Speaker 1: who is generally regarded as having been a kinder director
Speaker 1: with a more genuine concern for the well being of
Speaker 1: the students. He was put in place, and Barbie returned
Speaker 1: to make his case again. Unfortunately, I think penning A
Speaker 1: recognized that the best judge of what kind of writing
Speaker 1: system would be useful to the blind students would be
Speaker 1: the students themselves, so he sponsored a period in which
Speaker 1: the students could experiment with Barbie's dot based system of
Speaker 1: night writing, and the students almost immediately recognized the superiority
Speaker 1: of the dot based system over the system of the
Speaker 1: embosted print letters. The dots were simply much easier to
Speaker 1: read and to reproduce, given the help of a slate
Speaker 1: and a stylus, than the shapes of the print letters,
Speaker 1: and of course one of the students who participated in
Speaker 1: this experiment was the young Louis Braille, still a teenager
Speaker 1: at the time, or actually I think at the beginning
Speaker 1: he wasn't even a teenager yet. And so Braile had
Speaker 1: excelled as a student at the institute. He was said
Speaker 1: to be like very clever and avid learner, and he
Speaker 1: he had mastered the the old Hui system of of
Speaker 1: you know, the the embost letters, and had read all
Speaker 1: the books, and he eventually moved on to teaching other
Speaker 1: students there. And so Braill saw the potential for a
Speaker 1: system like night writing or something you know, related to it.
Speaker 1: So what he did is he simplified Barbier's night writing
Speaker 1: system to make it faster to read and write, creating
Speaker 1: the Braille system. And he revealed the system in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty four. And he also later adapted it to a
Speaker 1: musical notation exactly. And so though the idea of the
Speaker 1: raised dots to represent sounds or letters came from barbi A,
Speaker 1: Brail completely reorganized the code system to make it much
Speaker 1: more practical. Original Barbier system had been the cells composed
Speaker 1: of twelve possible dots that could you know, be arranged
Speaker 1: to show the different letters. And while this cell was
Speaker 1: easier to read than an embossed alphabetic letter like in
Speaker 1: Hui's system, it was still too large to read very quickly.
Speaker 1: And so what Brail did is he simplified the letter
Speaker 1: system the cell to just six dots, which could fit
Speaker 1: under a single fingertip and allow much faster reading. And
Speaker 1: one crazy thing to think about is that Brail is
Speaker 1: only fifteen or sixteen when he finished creating this code. Well,
Speaker 1: let's take another break, and when we come back, we're
Speaker 1: going to discuss the invention of Brail itself and its legacy. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, so, uh, you know we've alluded this already,
Speaker 1: but but let's take a minute to discuss what Brail
Speaker 1: exactly is. It is a tactile system of written language.
Speaker 1: It's a way, uh to read the written word via
Speaker 1: raised dots on a surface with your fingers, and this
Speaker 1: is of course ideal for individuals who are blind or
Speaker 1: vision impaired. Brail, however, is not a language, yes, and
Speaker 1: that's important. It's much the same way that the alphabet
Speaker 1: is not a language. Alphabets are ways of encoding existing languages,
Speaker 1: and so is Brail. Yeah, it's it's a code that's
Speaker 1: been adapted to many existing language. Sense of the original French.
Speaker 1: For instance, there's English brail or Grade two brail, and
Speaker 1: this consists of two hundred and fifty different marks representing letters, numbers,
Speaker 1: punctuation marks, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations. Each brail symbol
Speaker 1: is formed via brail cells, each show with spaces for
Speaker 1: six raised dots. So a full brail cell contains six
Speaker 1: raised dots and two parallel rows of three dots each.
Speaker 1: You've probably seen them before, but they look kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, they can sort of resemble like dominoes or
Speaker 1: the sides of a die. Yeah, imagine a domino with
Speaker 1: space for only six dots, again in two vertical rows
Speaker 1: of three. And of course, as you mentioned, there are
Speaker 1: different forms of brail, right, So first let's consider the
Speaker 1: most basic form, what's generally referred to as uncontracted brail.
Speaker 1: This is helpful for beginners learning brail. For instance, so
Speaker 1: if you have in this system, if you have a
Speaker 1: phrase and you want to spell it out, you spell
Speaker 1: it out letter by letter, so you would you know,
Speaker 1: if you're writing, um, you know, and then it came
Speaker 1: to pass, you would do A than you would do
Speaker 1: in than you would do D, and you would just
Speaker 1: spell out every word in this sentence. But there are
Speaker 1: of course many words in the English language that are
Speaker 1: usually just read as sort of units. You don't have
Speaker 1: to go one letter at a time, right, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: think of site words for instance, you know the words
Speaker 1: where you just you just look at it and you
Speaker 1: know it. And so this is where we get into
Speaker 1: contracted brail, in which some hundred and eighty different letter
Speaker 1: contractions come into play to shorten and simplify everything, making
Speaker 1: it again faster to read and easier to write. By
Speaker 1: the way, I know some of you who have listened
Speaker 1: to past episodes of Stuff to Blow your mind to
Speaker 1: deal with with the Mandarin language, or particularly Chinese typewriter,
Speaker 1: you might be asking yourself, huh, I wonder how Mandarin
Speaker 1: is translated into brail, because it's not a phonetic written language. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it it. I've looked this up, and the way
Speaker 1: it works is that the Chinese brail represents the sounds
Speaker 1: of language rather than the many Chinese characters that would
Speaker 1: be involved in in traditional written Chinese language, so it's
Speaker 1: a little bit different. Each symbol contains three Brail letters initial, final,
Speaker 1: and then something representing the tone. Uh So, in a way,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like opinion brail, you know, in which
Speaker 1: Mandarin Chinese is rendered in um, you know, in in
Speaker 1: in in Western characters like transliterated script. Exactly. Now. I
Speaker 1: mentioned the slate in the style USTs earlier, and that's
Speaker 1: an important tool for writing in Brail because it helps
Speaker 1: guide the writer in order to punch out the letters
Speaker 1: to form the code they're creating, and helps keep the
Speaker 1: letters evenly spaced and along the same line and against
Speaker 1: so much easier than trying to then create embossed letters
Speaker 1: on paper. Yeah, exactly. And so as for this invention,
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about how we sort of alluded
Speaker 1: to this earlier. But I think it's important to think
Speaker 1: about how Braill was not the first attempt to create
Speaker 1: a reading and writing system for the blind and visually impaired.
Speaker 1: Before this, you had things like the embossed alphabetic letters
Speaker 1: of Valentin Hui, you had the night writing of Barbier,
Speaker 1: and these inventions were not worthless. But despite the efforts
Speaker 1: of these inventors, they weren't nearly as useful or efficient
Speaker 1: as they could have been. And it took the insights
Speaker 1: of Louis Brail himself to streamline the code system to
Speaker 1: its optimal form. And I can't help but think that
Speaker 1: this must have something to do with the fact that
Speaker 1: Brail himself was a blind reader with direct personal experience
Speaker 1: of the day to day issues faced by blind readers,
Speaker 1: understanding sort of the texture of the experience, what it's
Speaker 1: like to read with one's fingers, and having no other
Speaker 1: choice but to read with his fingers, and so he
Speaker 1: was able to imagine improvements in the system that others didn't.
Speaker 1: And this sort of reminds me of something that often
Speaker 1: seems true about invention, that the insights that often lead
Speaker 1: to the best inventions are not always just rooted in
Speaker 1: things like engineering, genius, and creativity. They also are rooted
Speaker 1: in habitual familiarity with the kinds of problems that the
Speaker 1: invention is needed to solve, like hands on experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and really, the Brail, even if we go go
Speaker 1: back to the roots in night writing, like that was
Speaker 1: and that was rooted in an attempt to solve a
Speaker 1: problem UM that the the innovator had a real world
Speaker 1: experience with UM. And granted it was military situation, but
Speaker 1: then and then this technology has passed on to Brail,
Speaker 1: who has a direct experience of the sightless world and
Speaker 1: uses his familiarity with this you know, you know, altered
Speaker 1: sensory experience to create Brail and uh, and this is
Speaker 1: the system we have today. Like, this is still the
Speaker 1: standard for for for written language for the blind. Yes,
Speaker 1: that we should mention that. Since then, there have been
Speaker 1: other types of of encoding written language for the blind, Like,
Speaker 1: there are other One thing I've been reading about is that,
Speaker 1: for example, there are other systems for people who became
Speaker 1: blind later in life, and we're more used to the
Speaker 1: alphabetic language. Uh. That's something a little bit more like
Speaker 1: the old Hui system. Right, It's got like embossed letters.
Speaker 1: There are also versions that attempt to sort of like
Speaker 1: mingle the two, where you sort of like make letters
Speaker 1: out of raised dots. And that's designed to be useful
Speaker 1: so that like, if you are a blind writer, you
Speaker 1: can use that too. It might be slower going, but
Speaker 1: can produce a script that's also readable to people who
Speaker 1: only know like the sited alphabet. Right. And then Brail
Speaker 1: has continued to evolve over time, first of all, to
Speaker 1: meet new language demands. So We mentioned the Man for
Speaker 1: an example, but another great example is Niemth Brail, a
Speaker 1: form of brail developed in nineteen fifty two by American
Speaker 1: mathematician and invent or Abraham Niemoth, who was by the way,
Speaker 1: born blind UH. And it was officially integrated in to
Speaker 1: you needed United English Brail in and it is used
Speaker 1: to write mathematics in brail. UH. There's also the Gardener
Speaker 1: Salinas brail codes created to codify math and scientific notation,
Speaker 1: and there's also the Brail code of chemical notation. From So,
Speaker 1: we've seen this sort of continual broadening of the system
Speaker 1: as the system has needed to UH to explain and
Speaker 1: express different systems, different written systems, in addition to just
Speaker 1: sort of core UH written language needs. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: there are continuing challenges in adapting brail technology. I mean,
Speaker 1: one thing that might be rather obvious is the idea
Speaker 1: that a lot of the text we encounter today happens
Speaker 1: not on in printed text but on screens. That's right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we've seen we have seen some amazing breakthroughs though
Speaker 1: with a refreshable brail to spread displays. These provide access
Speaker 1: to information on a computer screen by electronically raised and
Speaker 1: lowering different combinations of pins in brail cells. And uh,
Speaker 1: this is you know the kind of price technology. Um,
Speaker 1: the price of brail displays range from thirty fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: dollars depending on the number of characters displayed. And then
Speaker 1: there's the whole history of of brail writing machines and
Speaker 1: brail printers. Uh. Frank haven Hall presented the first brail
Speaker 1: writer machine in and various improvements came with time. Today
Speaker 1: we even have you know, brail computer printers, portable brail
Speaker 1: note taking devices, and then the brail displays that we've
Speaker 1: already mentioned. Um, you have, but brail printers range from say,
Speaker 1: small scale brail printers that cost between eighteen hundred and
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars to large volume ones that can cost
Speaker 1: between ten thousand and eighty thousand dollars. But but the
Speaker 1: technology exists. You can hook a printer up to a
Speaker 1: machine and print in brail if you have the right technology.
Speaker 1: Other bit of technology worth noting the brail wristwatch, where
Speaker 1: you lift the lid of the time piece to quote
Speaker 1: unquote touch the time. This makes me wonder about a
Speaker 1: question that I don't know if we can really fully
Speaker 1: answer that we might be able to say a little
Speaker 1: bit about it. Is um, the question of how the
Speaker 1: experience of reading is different or is it different when
Speaker 1: you're reading with eyes versus reading with your fingers. I
Speaker 1: was wondering about this as well, because it's you know,
Speaker 1: I guess my experience and this is limited. But but
Speaker 1: just thinking about the differences between reading written text and say,
Speaker 1: listening to an audio book. Yeah, it's a very different,
Speaker 1: expert different experience. You can still I mean, ultimately, I
Speaker 1: guess the if you have to like drive home, like, well,
Speaker 1: what are the difference businesses between reading the Lion, the
Speaker 1: Witch and the Wardrobe versus uh, listening to it in
Speaker 1: the car? Um. I mean, it's still the same story,
Speaker 1: still has the same characters, but there but there is
Speaker 1: something different about the experience. It's a different way of
Speaker 1: absorbing the content. Yeah, I wonder what those differences are, like, um,
Speaker 1: with with Braill versus these other means. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: want to necessarily go like full Marshal McCluin, but I
Speaker 1: do believe that, like the physical substrates of our media
Speaker 1: do play a role in shaping thought in culture, in
Speaker 1: the nature of the experience of the information that gets
Speaker 1: shared on that media. So if printed text is one
Speaker 1: medium and brail is another, is that experience of reading
Speaker 1: one versus the other substantially different and in terms of
Speaker 1: the internal sensation of reading one versus the other, I
Speaker 1: don't know what the answer is. I was trying to
Speaker 1: look for it was trying to read around on this
Speaker 1: and I couldn't find much on the subject, though maybe
Speaker 1: there's good stuff out there. I did come across a
Speaker 1: study in Current biology from the year two thousand eleven
Speaker 1: by Rice's ved Cohen and Amedi called a ventral visual
Speaker 1: stream reading center independent of visual experience. And so what
Speaker 1: the authors of this study it was a neuroscience study
Speaker 1: where they did an fmr I speriment on, you know,
Speaker 1: measuring brain function while people were reading across different media.
Speaker 1: And the authors said that there's this pathway in the
Speaker 1: brain that is thought to be important for reading visual text,
Speaker 1: and it's called the visual word form area or the
Speaker 1: vWF A and the author's right quote. This study investigated
Speaker 1: which area plays the role of the vWF A in
Speaker 1: the blind. One would expect this area to be at
Speaker 1: either parietal or bilateral occipital cortex, reflecting the tactle nature
Speaker 1: of the task, and cross moodal plasticity, respectively. So they're
Speaker 1: thinking that, Okay, if somebody's reading with their fingers, that
Speaker 1: they would expect the parts of the brain involved to
Speaker 1: be like parts of the brain that are normally associated
Speaker 1: with touch sensation. But the author has used FMR I
Speaker 1: to see what brain activity looks like when blind readers
Speaker 1: read in brail, and what they found was quote striking
Speaker 1: anatomical consistency within and between blind and cited readers. And
Speaker 1: so the authors this led them to proposed that the
Speaker 1: visual word form area is not necessarily about visual words. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's quote a metamodal reading area that develops specialization for
Speaker 1: reading regardless of visual experience. So that's fascinating, Like, if
Speaker 1: they're correct about this, it means that there's sort of
Speaker 1: a suite of brain functions that are used specifically for
Speaker 1: consuming symbolic representations of language, whether that symbolic representation is
Speaker 1: visual seeing of letters or tactle feeling of dot cells.
Speaker 1: And the authors say that this, uh, this they believe
Speaker 1: supports the model that brain areas are quote task machines,
Speaker 1: not sensory machines. But that's really interesting again, if they're corrected,
Speaker 1: it suggests that there's something deeper about reading that is
Speaker 1: more fundamental than visual processing. Reading isn't just about seeing.
Speaker 1: There's something in the brain that is the reading function
Speaker 1: that's deeper than seeing. And that's really when you get
Speaker 1: down to it, like, that's what brail does. It like
Speaker 1: it it gets straight to that process and cuts out
Speaker 1: the complexities of just trying to take this existing visual
Speaker 1: system and make it uh readable by the blind. You know.
Speaker 1: Another way that I think Brail is really interesting in
Speaker 1: technology history is it is absolutely not a case where
Speaker 1: the delay and the invention of Brail was caused by
Speaker 1: some lack of technology. Right. It wasn't that that we
Speaker 1: didn't have electricity or didn't have X, Y or z
Speaker 1: that allowed us to produce this technology. It was really
Speaker 1: just a lack of people turning their attention towards this
Speaker 1: task and putting resources into it. Right. There is a
Speaker 1: certain level of cultural advancement that needed to be in place,
Speaker 1: cultural values that needed to be in place. I also
Speaker 1: think there's a case to be made for just sort
Speaker 1: of the shrinking of the world, you know, the growing
Speaker 1: of populations, and and also the way that the communities
Speaker 1: of the blind could be brought together too in cases
Speaker 1: like this begin to solve problems that they faced individually.
Speaker 1: That means that they faced as a group, you know,
Speaker 1: because there's a school for the blind, there's a place
Speaker 1: for Charles Barbier to go with his night writing invention
Speaker 1: and say I think this might be useful exactly, and
Speaker 1: then a place for an individual like Brail to rise
Speaker 1: to prominence. Yes, now I didn't even you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't even go down the sort of sci fi track
Speaker 1: here on this, but it does make me wonder if
Speaker 1: there are any science fiction treatments that explore the possibility
Speaker 1: of of what a written communications system in an inherently
Speaker 1: blind uh civilization might consist of. You know, um, because
Speaker 1: one of the we focused on some of the the
Speaker 1: interesting aspects of Brail in which it is a system
Speaker 1: by the blind for the blind, but of course it
Speaker 1: is based that it stems from a system and a
Speaker 1: culture of the sided. Uh. One wonders like what a
Speaker 1: purely um, a purely a tactile writing system might have
Speaker 1: consisted of. Maybe it would be very much like Brail. Well,
Speaker 1: there you have to wonder again. Either way, language begins
Speaker 1: as a spoken and heard the like it's oral um
Speaker 1: and so that it gets translated into symbolic coding like alphabets,
Speaker 1: and then later like brail. You didn't have to have
Speaker 1: the alphabet in between. You could have gone straight from
Speaker 1: spoken language to brail, right, but it had to start
Speaker 1: with spoken language there. I wonder are you asking, maybe,
Speaker 1: like if you could have gone straight from an auditory
Speaker 1: and spoken language to brail or a language that is
Speaker 1: tactile from the beginning, Yeah, Like what would like would
Speaker 1: it would it? Would it be necessary too? Like we
Speaker 1: have the alphabet standing between spoken word and brail? Uh,
Speaker 1: but yeah, what would it would it be like if
Speaker 1: there was a more erect line between these two systems,
Speaker 1: or would it just be necessary to invent something like
Speaker 1: the alphabet some other version of the alphabet to to
Speaker 1: serve as these sort the translation of these two sensory experiences.
Speaker 1: I don't see any inherent reason that would have to
Speaker 1: be anyway. I find language technology generally fascinating, and I
Speaker 1: want to continue to return to the idea of language
Speaker 1: technologies as we as we go on in this show,
Speaker 1: because I wanted, for example, explore the idea of invented
Speaker 1: languages people try to invent languages. Why do these not
Speaker 1: catch on? How come it's so hard now impossible to
Speaker 1: really do it? Oh? Yes, I definitely want to come
Speaker 1: back to this, because you have you have invented languages
Speaker 1: that sort of have a a higher or more noble purpose,
Speaker 1: and then you you have um fictional languages of the
Speaker 1: likes of Klingon, which are which is still a linguistic
Speaker 1: linguistic system created. Uh you know, with all the hallmarks
Speaker 1: of an actual language. It can be learned, it can
Speaker 1: be spoken. Uh So yeah, I would love to come
Speaker 1: back and discuss that. So much of the of that
Speaker 1: is uh, you know, not being a linguist myself, and
Speaker 1: you know, the concept is is kind of foreig into me. Like,
Speaker 1: for instance, when I think of JR. Tolken, you know,
Speaker 1: it's easy to think, oh, you know, I'm totally behind
Speaker 1: the idea of setting down and creating an entire world
Speaker 1: of of monsters and magic. But then the idea of
Speaker 1: setting down and also creating an entire language for one
Speaker 1: of the people's or numerous uh species in the given world,
Speaker 1: that just sounds like way too much worked for me.
Speaker 1: But then again, I'm not a linguist. Maybe creating languages
Speaker 1: is one of those things, kind of like playing a
Speaker 1: musical instrument, Like it's not really fun until you're good
Speaker 1: enough to do it, you know. Yeah, Like it seems
Speaker 1: not fun to you because you wouldn't know where to start.
Speaker 1: But if you were a linguist and you had all
Speaker 1: kinds ideas about the roots of language and how words
Speaker 1: are formed and all that, maybe then it's just a blast.
Speaker 1: One thing I would love to explore in this hypothetical
Speaker 1: episode on fictional languages is if one had to choose so,
Speaker 1: like an alien species comes down dominates the earth and says,
Speaker 1: all right, all your all these existing languages that you're using,
Speaker 1: they're all garbage. We're getting rid of all of them.
Speaker 1: You guys get to vote on it, on which language
Speaker 1: you're all going to use, But it can only be
Speaker 1: a language that was developed exclusively for a film or
Speaker 1: TV show, Like which one is? Like, is nave better
Speaker 1: than cling on? Is cling is close? Doth rat Like,
Speaker 1: what is the most robust and useful fictional language system?
Speaker 1: The doth racky have no words? The thought experiment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's see, that's the problem that I feel like we
Speaker 1: might run into it. It's probably cling on. That's my my,
Speaker 1: my guests. Based on some very preliminary research, the cling
Speaker 1: on seems to maybe have received the most work, but
Speaker 1: I could be very wrong on that, you know, Robert,
Speaker 1: Judging on our history with listener mail, I bet a
Speaker 1: couple of listeners are going to write in with thoughts
Speaker 1: about this. We're gonna receive some opinions. Well, I hope so.
Speaker 1: And likewise, I do hope we hear from from any
Speaker 1: listener out there who who needs Brail or you know,
Speaker 1: anybody who is blind or vision impaired that has some
Speaker 1: additional insight that they would like to share on this topic.
Speaker 1: And also, if you've I mean, if you've had the
Speaker 1: experience of both reading printed text and reading brail, do
Speaker 1: you think that there is a major difference in the
Speaker 1: experience of reading the two And if so, what is
Speaker 1: that difference? Like? All right, so we're gonna close it
Speaker 1: off there, But if you want to check out all
Speaker 1: the episodes of Invention, there are several different ways to
Speaker 1: do it. You can check out our homepage that's uh
Speaker 1: invention pod dot com. That's where you'll find all the
Speaker 1: episodes linked us out to some social media accounts as well.
Speaker 1: And of course you can find this podcast anywhere you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. And if you want to help us out,
Speaker 1: a great thing to do is to first of all
Speaker 1: subscribe to Invention at any of these uh these sources,
Speaker 1: and then rate and review us if you have the
Speaker 1: power to do so. That helps us out immensely. Thanks
Speaker 1: to Scott Benjamin for research assistance with this episode, and
Speaker 1: thanks to our awesome audio producer Tory Harrison. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us directly with
Speaker 1: feedback about this episode or any other, to suggest a
Speaker 1: topic for the future, or just to say hello, let
Speaker 1: us know how you found out about the show, where
Speaker 1: you listen from, and all that stuff, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at invention pod dot com.