Thunder Dog

by Michael Hingson

  She has her ears too; dogs can hear sound at four times the distance humans can. That means if I can hear things happening twenty steps below, she can clearly hear what’s going on eighty steps below. She also has a powerful sense of touch. Not only does she hone in on the signals I send through my hand on the upright handle of her harness, but her entire body is covered with touch-sensitive nerve endings, and around her eyes, muzzle, and jaws, she has exquisitely sensitive hairs called vibrissae that continuously feed her information about her environment.

  On top of that, dogs seem to have a sixth sense, sometimes surprising us by predicting earthquakes or finding their way home from a distant location. They can read our moods through our pheromones, the chemicals produced by our bodies in connection with emotion. They seem sensitive to changes in the earth’s magnetic field and to infrared wavelengths of light. And, like Roselle did earlier this morning, dogs can detect sudden changes in barometric pressure, like when a storm is brewing.

  Thinking about Roselle’s special abilities gives me confidence. We are going to make it out. My teamwork with Roselle and the confidence it gives each of us seem to transmit to the people immediately around us, almost like a zone of security. We are close on the stairwell and our defenses are down. All we have is each other, and there is a feeling of working together to make it out safely. We are strong.

  A few steps below, David calls out. “There are firemen coming up the stairs. Everyone move to the side.” I go down to where David stands.

  It’s the 30th floor, and here they come. As they approach, we instinctively string out into a single-file line to let them pass. The firefighters are loaded down with equipment. Besides having to wear protective thigh-length jacket and pants, most of them carry fifty or sixty pounds of gear, including helmets, gloves, axes, and air tanks. They are tired and sweaty, and they’re not even halfway up to the fire.

  Later, reports on the events of September 11 would suggest that the firefighters in the stairwell didn’t know much more about what was going on than we did. Cell phones and radios weren’t working well and communication was spotty at best. Oral histories from the few firefighters who survived say they were “clueless” about the details and knew “absolutely nothing” about the reality of the impending crisis.2

  “Hey, buddy. Are you okay?” The very first of a long line of firefighters stops and talks to me on the 30th floor.

  “I’m fine.” I feel Roselle moving and I know he is petting her. It doesn’t seem like the time to give him a lecture about not petting a guide dog in harness.

  “We’re going to send somebody down the stairs with you.”

  “You don’t have to do that. Things are going fine and I don’t think I need help.”

  “Well, we’re going to send somebody down with you, because we want to make sure you get down okay.”

  I think of the millions of pieces of burning paper raining down outside my office windows. These guys need to get up those stairs to fight the fire.

  “You don’t have to do that.” I can tell he’s determined to help me. “I’ve got a guide dog and we’re good.”

  “Nice dog,” he says, stroking Roselle. She is friendly, as usual, and gently mouths his hand.

  “Anyway, you can’t get lost going downstairs.” I try to make it light.

  His voice deepens and takes on a bit of an edge. I can tell he’s used to being listened to. “We’re going to send somebody with you.”

  I want to tell him my blindness isn’t a handicap, but it’s not the right time for that lecture either. I use the last gun in my arsenal. “Look, my friend David is here. He can see, and we’re fine.”

  The firefighter turns to David. “Are you with him? Is everything okay?” David reassures him we’re fine.

  I hear him shrug his shoulders and resettle the tank on his back, and I know he’s about to head upstairs. The men below him stir, restless. They’re anxious to get upstairs and get to it.

  “Is there anything we can do to help you guys?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “You’ve got to go.”

  He gives Roselle one last pat. She kisses his hand and then he is gone. I would realize later that this touch was probably the last unconditional love he ever got.

  I tighten my grip on the harness. The cold water is long gone, and I can taste the jet fuel again.

  “Forward.” We head down the stairs. I think about Roselle and the firefighter and wonder, Can she smell courage?

  I’ve had a lifetime to develop the skills needed to navigate through a world not set up for me. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: sight is not the only game in town.

  Blindness is not a handicap; it’s something I’ve always lived with. The real handicap comes from the prejudices people have about blindness. I knew the firefighter was only trying to help, but sometimes help is not what I need. Even so, the firefighter couldn’t be diverted until I pointed out that I had a sighted colleague “assisting me.”

  I just use a few different tools than other people do. One of the tools I got along the way allowed me to do something I’ve always wanted to do: pilot an airplane. But first let me tell you about some of the others.

  It all started with Braille, my entry into the world of words and ideas. Unfortunately, the majority of blind people cannot read Braille. A tactile system developed in Paris by Louis Braille in 1821, Braille is a reading and writing language all blind people should learn how to use. By using combinations of up to six raised dots, a person can interpret printed codes for letters of the alphabet or combinations of letters by running an index finger across the raised surfaces.

  In fourth grade, my parents bought me a Braille writer from Germany, called a Marburg. A Braille writer is a wood-and-metal machine about half the size of a typewriter. Six Braille keys and a spacing key are made of wood topped with ivory. The six keys operate the mechanism that produces dots to form the letters, contractions, or symbols used to write Braille. Paper is fed into a cylindrical paper roller and turning knobs at either end of the roller feeds the paper into the machine.

  The Perkins Brailler, manufactured by Perkins Products/ Howe Press in Massachusetts, was the best Braille writer on the market, but it cost more than a hundred dollars, a small fortune at the time. The Marburg was half that, so I used it for three years before the local Lions club bought me a Perkins.

  When I was nine, I discovered “talking books” and became enthralled with Perry Mason, the defense attorney determined to prove his clients’ innocence, and Nero Wolf, the fat, gourmet private detective. I listened to many classic and contemporary books recorded on twelve-inch records. These books were created by a program administered by the Library of Congress. Special libraries were established throughout the United States to distribute or loan out these books to blind people. Some books required ten to twenty records, and I remember hearing that the recording of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich required fifty-six records. I decided to skip that one.

  I still listen to talking books, work on my computer, and use Braille daily. But instead of a wood, metal, and ivory manual Braille writer, I now use a BrailleNote, a small computer about the size of a medium size hardcover book with a tactile display that allows me to electronically read and write in Braille with no monitor needed.

  Another technological tool I use daily is a talking smart phone. I have software on my computer that operates a screen reader that verbalizes the information contained in documents, spreadsheets, and on Web sites. After years of practice, I can listen to and decipher the voice of my screen reader at hundreds of words a minute. The voice sounds a little like an auctioneer on speed, but it allows me to get through e-mail and documents quickly.

  Just a couple of years ago, along came a game changer that enabled me to do something I never thought I’d be able to do— read my mail. Think about it. For a blind person to read mail, he has to ask a friend or hire an assistant to help read it. But now, thanks to the K-NFB Reader by Mobile Prod
ucts, I can read any sort of print, whether menus, magazines, instructions, labels, recipes, or even junk mail. It works like this: using a cell phone, the user takes a photo of the print to be read and the character recognition software, in conjunction with high-quality text-to-speech, reads the contents of the document aloud.

  The K-NFB Reader is the great-grandchild of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the world’s very first omni-font optical character recognition system. This remarkable machine was invented by Raymond Kurzweil, a futurist and inventor who came up with a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a very few standardized fonts.

  Kurzweil had known he wanted to be an inventor since the age of six. While a student at MIT, he became interested in using computers for pattern recognition. His ideas were innovative but needed a real-world application.

  One day Kurzweil was on an airplane and struck up a conversation with a blind man sitting next to him. He asked what type of technology would be most helpful in addressing a blind person’s needs. He expected the answer to be related to mobility. Instead, the man said the technology that would be the most helpful would be a device that could read print.

  After that chance conversation, Kurzweil decided that the best application of his scanning technology would be to create a reading machine that would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud.

  My very first job out of college, in a remarkable stroke of luck, I got to work with Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil, now an internationally recognized inventor and futurist.

  Ray first approached the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) with his idea for a reading machine back in 1974. They were skeptical at first, but after an eye-opening demonstration at the inventor’s laboratory on Rogers Road in Massachusetts where the reading machine read some of the materials the NFB brought, they began a working relationship. With Ray’s help, the NFB approached foundations for funding and purchased five machines, which were placed in various locations around the country for blind people to use. These were the prototypes and were about the size of an apartment-sized washing machine. The reading machine used a flatbed scanner and scanned just one line at a time. It took about thirty to forty-five seconds to scan an 81/2 x 11–inch page of text, then another minute or so to recognize the text and begin to read it out loud.

  The first five machines were located at the Iowa Commission for the Blind; Blind Industries and Services of Maryland; the New York Public Library; the University of Colorado; and the Orientation Center for the Blind in Albany, California (later moved to the San Francisco Public Library).

  These machines were just prototypes and needed the bugs worked out, so after graduation I was hired by the NFB to work with James Gashel, director of governmental affairs for the NFB, to test the machines out in the real world. It was my job to teach people how to use them and to write the training curriculum. I traveled from place to place, collecting data about how people were using the machines, and then incorporated that into recommendations for the production model of the machines. I was the day-to-day guy. I had a ball traveling around the country, teaching people how to use the machines and helping to make their experience a good one so they could use the machines and provide us with feedback. My findings helped refine the design and make it more user-friendly. I even helped come up with the concept of a “nominator” key, which directed the machine to read aloud the names and functions of the control keys. We also came up with a “Contrast” control to make light print appear darker to the camera, thus widening the amount of material those first machines could read.

  In 1978, I began to work directly for Ray at Kurzweil Computer Products. I ended up doing the same thing I had done before, working on human-factor studies and coming up with ways to make the machine better and even more user-friendly. Later I ended up moving into the sales force and selling the commercial version of the product. I took a Dale Carnegie sales course and helped to move the reading machine into the corporate world, where it was a great product for companies who wanted to scan documents. Eventually Xerox purchased Kurzweil’s company in order to get at the scanner technology and brought in their own people. I was the last non-Xerox person to be laid off from the sales force.

  During my time in Boston, I became friends with Aaron Kleiner, who had been Ray’s roommate at MIT and who worked closely with Ray. Once I talked Aaron into going with me to see the first Star Wars movie. It was a very big deal and lines were long. He couldn’t believe a blind guy wanted to go to the movies. He thought it was even more hilarious when I asked him to describe the visuals. “That was a challenge,” Aaron said. “I’ll never forget trying to describe the cantina scene. ‘Uh, there’s a guy with the head of a grasshopper and the body of a horse . . .’”

  Aaron and I had an even more interesting experience at a ritzy restaurant in Boston’s Back Bay. There were three of us: Aaron, his wife, and me. The minute we walked in the front door, the d’ took one look at my guide dog, Holland, and said, “We’re sorry. We don’t allow dogs. You can’t come in here.” I wasn’t too upset; since I’d dealt with this before.

  “This is wrong,” I said. “They don’t know the law.”

  We left and had dinner at a different restaurant, but Aaron’s wife was shaking, she was so angry. I told her, “Don’t worry. I know what to do.”

  The next day, I printed out a copy of the guide dog law and contacted the local chapter of the National Federation of the Blind. I rounded up six or seven other blind people with guide dogs, and we showed up for dinner back at the restaurant with the snooty d’. We opened the door and surged in, a pack of blind warriors with our trusty dogs.

  The d’ stopped. Looked at us. Blinked. Considered his options. Caved.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  We had a wonderful dinner and were treated well. The restaurant staff was solicitous, even offering food to the guide dogs.

  Blind power.

  The Kurzweil Reading Machine was revolutionary. On January 13, 1976, the finished product was rolled out by Raymond Kurzweil and NFB during a news conference. It gained him national recognition. On the day of the machine’s unveiling, Walter Cronkite used the machine to give his signature send-off, “And that’s the way it is, January 13, 1976.” While listening to the Today show, musician Stevie Wonder heard a demonstration of the device and purchased the first production version of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, beginning a lifelong friendship with Ray. Ray was later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for this invention. He was also awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bill Clinton for pioneering new technologies.

  Ray was always interested in music and went on to start a company that developed the most state-of-the-art music synthesizer in the industry. He ended up selling that company to Yamaha. Later he started working on voice recognition, and the most successful programs currently on the market are based on algorithms he created.

  That washing machine–sized reading machine that originally cost fifty thousand dollars is now under two thousand bucks, and I carry the software on my cell phone so I can use it to read anything, anywhere, anytime.

  Oh, and one last tool. This is the one that allowed me to fly a plane. Not long ago I purchased a GPS system that integrated with my Braille Notetaker. This system was developed by another blind man, Mike May, and his company, the Sendero Group. I had to fly to a speaking engagement in Idaho. My brother-in-law Gary Ashurst had arranged for me to deliver a speech in Hailey, Idaho, and he also arranged for a friend to come to Boise to fetch me in his private plane.

  It was a clear and beautiful autumn day. While we were walking to his four-seater Cessna, the pilot noticed my BrailleNote hanging over my shoulder. He also examined my new GPS receiver and started asking questions. Before we took off, I showed him how it worked and told him I was going to use it to track our flight.

  I got Roselle settled in, I buc
kled up, and we took off.

  Just after we lifted off the runway, the pilot asked me a question I never thought I would hear. “How would you like to fly the plane to Hailey?”

  I didn’t need a second invitation. After all, if I could learn to hear a coffee table, ride my bike around Palmdale, hop on a horse, play golf, and drive a car around the UC Irvine campus, then I could certainly fly a plane.

  Since I was sitting in the right-hand seat, which also contained full access to the equipment necessary to fly the plane, I took the controls. I got some instructions on how to use the stick and other relevant controls, and then the pilot released the operations to me. My trusty GPS talked me through the skies above Idaho and guided me to the Hailey airport in about an hour. Roselle snored through the whole thing.

  I was able to land the plane with a few instructions. In the process, we noticed the altimeter on the GPS was not quite accurate. In fact, it was one hundred feet off, showing that we were lower than we actually were. It didn’t ruffle me much; I’d rather err on the low side than think the plane was higher than it really was.

  For blind people, emerging technology is changing the rules of the game, and the sky’s the limit.

  8

  I FORGOT

  YOU ARE BLIND

  “Prejudice comes from being in the

  dark; sunlight disinfects it.”

  MUHAMMAD ALI