Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor (15 November 1939 – 11 January 2021) was an American engineer, a pioneer in development of telecommunications devices for the deaf (also known as TTYs). He also enjoyed a kind of celebrity status because of his central role in the award-winning documentary Hear and Now. The film by daughter Irene Taylor Brodsky chronicles the before and after experiences of her parents, Paul and Sally Taylor, both of whom underwent cochlear implant surgeries in their mid-60s after a lifetime of deafness.

Education Taylor earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in 1962. He was awarded a master's degree in operational research from Washington University in St. Louis.

Career Taylor worked for 12 years in various engineering positions with McDonnell Douglas and Monsanto in St. Louis, Missouri. During the late 1960s, he combined Western Union teletypewriters with modems to create the first telecommunications devices for the deaf, known as TDDs or TTYs (teletypewriter). He distributed these early, non-portable devices to the homes of many in the Deaf community in St. Louis. He worked with others to establish a local telephone wake-up service. In the early 1970s, he created the nation's first local telephone relay system for the deaf.

In 1975, Taylor was named chair of the Engineering Support Team at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, New York. He would remain at NTID/RIT for the next 30 years. When he retired, he had become a professor of computer technology.

Writing in Variety, Peter Deburge assessed the film as "more "Oprah" than "Frontline," which suggests that those who see the film learn about a man and a father and a husband who also happens to have done something noteworthy in his working career as an engineer.