James C. Marsters

James Carlyle Marsters (April 5, 1924 – July 28, 2009) was a deaf orthodontist in Pasadena, California, who in 1964 helped invent the first teletypewriter device capable of being used with telephone lines. The device made communication by telephone possible for the deaf. Although Robert Weitbrecht did much of the actual design work, Marsters promoted the device's use.

Early life and career Marsters was born April 5, 1924, in Norwich, New York, to pharmaceutical executive Guy Marsters and his wife Anna Belle, a nurse.

When he was very young, Marsters lost his hearing to scarlet fever and measles. However, he learned to speak and to read lips. He graduated from Wright Oral School for the Deaf in New York City in 1943. It was there that he met John Tracy, the son of Spencer Tracy. In 1947 Marsters received a chemistry degree from Union College in Schenectady, New York.

Marsters married Joan Tausik, an artist who was also deaf (they later divorced), and went to work in her father's tie factory. It was Tausik's father who suggested he should become a dentist. Though Marsters' test scores were high, dental schools rejected him because of his deafness. After two and a half years of applying, New York University agreed to admit him on a provisional basis with the understanding that he would receive no special assistance. He graduated from New York University in 1952. He used to claim he could hear some, to help calm the fears of some of his dental school professors. He also flew an airplane between two cities where he practiced, and he would claim his radio wasn't working right and ask air traffic controllers to use lights to guide him.

John Tracy, whose name is on a Los Angeles clinic for hearing-impaired children encouraged Marsters to become an orthodontist, and in 1954, after studies at USC, he began his Pasadena practice. Soon after that, he married Alice Amelia Dorsey, the director of the clinic at John Tracy Clinic's preschool. Marsters had three children—James Marsters Jr., a chemist; Jean Marsters, a doctor; and Guy Marsters, a musician. Alice died in 2003. The couple had two grandchildren. They obtained old, salvaged teletypewriters machines from Western Union and the Defense Department and hooked them up to Weitbrecht's prototype modems.

In 1964, Weitbrecht succeeded in using the device to make a long-distance telephone call, to Marsters. It took several tries, until Weitbrecht's words appeared clearly: "Are you printing me now? Let's quit for now and gloat over the success." Together with engineer Andrew Saks (also deaf), whose grandfather started Saks Fifth Avenue, Marsters and Weitbrecht created The Applied Communications Corporation of Belmont, California to manufacture the modem.

The number of TTY devices increased from 18 in 1966, author Karen Peltz Strauss said, to 30,000 40 years later. The Internet probably resulted in a decline in the devices' use after a peak in the 1990s, she said.

TTY's could only communicate with other TTY's until the late 1960s when Marsters and Saks developed the idea of having phone company operators take TTY message and relay them by voice to hearing phones, and vice versa. One early attempt at this did not last because of the cost and the noise the machines made, but the concept led to a requirement of a similar service in the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 which is available nationwide today.

The Internet has replaced the TTY for the most part, but emergency services continue to use it.