Library Collections: Document: Full Text


As I Saw It

Creator: Robert Irwin (author)
Date: 1955
Publisher: American Foundation for the Blind
Source: American Printing House for the Blind, Inc., M. C. Migel Library
Figures From This Artifact: Figure 2

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Page 19:

185  

"...We hope that your conference may result in great benefit to the blind in the United States, and we welcome the opportunity of commending to you this difficult problem which we have been requested to consider.

186  

"We trust that the convention will appoint a representative committee to correspond and exchange views with the English committee, in the hope that out joint deliberation may finally evolve a system which will be acceptable to both countries....

187  

"The adoption of one system of point writing for the English-speaking world will cheapen books and bring the embossed literature of America, the United Kingdom and Colonies into common use among the blind..."

188  

This letter was sent to Mr. John E. Ray, Superintendent of the North Carolina School for the Blind and given by him to Mr. Benjamin B. Huntoon, recording secretary of the association. Dr. Campbell said at the 1907 convention of the American Association of Workers for the Blind that he learned later that Mr. Huntoon and Mr. Wait, chairman of the executive committee of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind, thought it better to put the letter away without reading it to the convention.

189  

Thus, both sides were at fault during the long struggle for a uniform type for the blind for the English-speaking world.

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PROGRESS IN BRAILLE EMBOSSING SINCE 1900

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Dr. Irwin was Director of the Bureau of Research and Education of the American Foundation for the Blind from 1923 to 1929, during the time in which the investigations into interpoint printing of braille and succeeding experimentations were carried on.

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Embossed printing for the blind has always been a very expensive process. The world of the blind owes a considerable debt of gratitude to the group of men who labored so faithfully to bring about a very substantial reduction in the cost of printing for the blind.

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AFTER the invention of the braille stereotype-maker which made possible embossing from metal plates, Dr. Edward E. Allen of Perkins Institution and his printer, Frank C. Bryan, continued to study the possibility of further lowering the cost of punctographic printing and reducing the bulk of embossed books. Experiments were also carried on at the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind under the inspiration of William Bell Wait and at the American Printing House for the Blind under the direction of Benjamin B. Huntoon.

194  

Since the days of Valentin Haüy, who printed the first books for the blind in Paris, France, embossers of books for the blind were troubled by the fact that the reverse side of the page from that read by the blind was not used. Haüy and some of his successors for a century or more bound their books in such a way that the thickness of the page was doubled and the embossed pages laid back to back in the volume.

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Sometimes this was accomplished by pasting the pages together, sometimes by merely folding them. This accomplished little, and since the left hand page is never quite as easy to read with the fingers as the right hand page the convenience of blind people was sacrificed primarily to make books for the blind look a little more like those printed for seeing people.

196  

In both Great Britain and the United States experiments were conducted in interlining, that is, embossing on one side of the page with the lines a little further apart than necessary for convenient reading, and by embossing on the opposite side of the page between the lines on the first side. This was done at Overbrook, at the New York Institute, and at the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville.

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Several methods of doing two-side printing were tried out. One was printing from a single plate embossed on both sides and attached to a corrugated roller. Another method was embossing on both sides of a single plate and printing with a soft rubber roller which would not only permit the paper to be embossed by the raised dots but would also force the moist paper into the pits in the metal sheet. The latter case proved to be a failure because the trapped air in these pits prevented the dots from filling the entire cavity. Thus, the resulting dots were of irregular size. A third way and the one finally adopted with improvements, was folding the thin metal plates on which the original embossing was done and stamping the dots through the two sheets produced by folding. Paper could then be inserted between the two folded sheets, run through a press and both sides printed at the same time. Fairly satisfactory printing was done this way, and by so doing nearly a third more printing could be done with the same amount of paper.

198  

Some experimentation was also conducted in what is called interpointing, that is, embossing on the reverse side of the page in such a way that the dots on the reverse side appeared between the lines and also between the dots on the first page. Theoretically this could be done without spreading the lines any further apart than was necessary for normal printing or spreading the dots any more than was necessary for one side printing. Experiments had been conducted at Overbrook with this method of printing and in 1898 a small book had been embossed in this way.

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