Jim Marsters '47 learned early and well a lesson-a credo perhaps-that has become both definitive and descriptive of his entire life.
As a deaf student at Union, Marsters earned his degree in pre-med in the three-year accelerated wartime program, with no special help. “In those days, supportive classroom interpreters were not available,” he says. “You had to learn to persist and to cope.”
Persist and cope is just what he did, has done, and continues to do. This May, for example, the Rochester Institute of Technology awarded him an honorary degree for his roles in the development of a telephone system for the deaf and the establishment of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
In his student days at Union, Marsters coped by copying classmates' notes and what the professors wrote on the blackboards.
“The professors didn't know what to make of me, as they never had a deaf student before. Ditto for the staff and administration. I knew I had to persist or 'perish.' ”
A native of Norwich, N.Y., Marsters has been profoundly deaf all of his life-a result of maternal rubella and a bout with scarlet fever when he was only three months old. He received pre-school speech training at Syracuse University and attended elementary school in Norwich, with extra help coming from a tutor only during after school hours. His high school years were spent in New York City at the Wright Oral School for the Deaf.
At Union, Marsters was a staffer on the Concordiensis, coached the College's fencing team, and worked as a professional magician, performing occasionally on WRGB-TV in Schenectady.
He was also a member of Sigma Chi fraternity, and it was here-surrounded by engineering students, immersed in his own math and science education, and frustrated by his inability to make a telephone call-that an idea began to bubble. That idea would later become the TTY, a telephone system for the deaf.
First, there were other things to do.
After finishing his degree, Marsters had a hard time convincing others to give him a job in the New York City area, and he spent more than a year working in a Manhattan tie factory. In the evenings, he took graduate classes in philosophy at Columbia University to expand his education. Despite being turned down by five dental schools, he persisted. The New York University College of Dentistry admitted him,
on probation, in 1948, and he graduated with his D.D.S. in 1952.
After earning his master's degree from the University of Southern California, he opened a solo private practice in Pasadena in 1954. For over 20 years, Dr. Marsters also flew his plane back and forth to his second office in Lone Pine, California. He practiced orthodontics for
thirty-eight years, retiring in 1992.
In 1964, he returned to the idea of TTY (which stands for Teletype). Up to then, Marsters says that a hearing person would help him make phone calls. On his own, he worked on other devices, including one that converted sound into a light signal to indicate when there was a dial tone and when someone was on the other end of the line.
Marsters recruited Robert Weitbrect, a deaf physicist from Stanford, and Andrew Saks, a deaf businessman from the Bay Area, and the three invented and patented a signaling technique using telephone, cable, satellite, light beams, and radio signals. This TTY “dream” made the telephone accessible to the deaf.
Obtaining funds, gaining acceptance, and getting the system out to others proved to be much more difficult. But Marsters and his partners persisted, involving the deaf community in “developing a sense of pride, and educating and encouraging them in the face of resistance,” he says.
The federal government was not receptive to the project, since it was only interested in a voice-into-printout
device, so the three financed the project themselves. Eventually, they got the Telephone Pioneers and others involved in helping restore old Teletype machines along with training deaf people.
In 1966, he went to England and made a well-received TTY presentation at the University of London. Later, Robert Weitbrect, Andrew Saks and Andrea Saks (Andrew's daughter) were able to break through objections from the Post Office (which owned the British Telephone system), and the TTY System gained acceptance in England. Slowly but surely, TTY grew, and eventually the ability to make international telephone calls became a reality.
Today, TTY is available worldwide, and there are state and national 800 relays allowing the deaf to do things they were once unable to do-such as calling the ambulance or police in an emergency or discussing business, jobs or education with family and friends, and vice versa.
Marsters later was appointed to the U.S. National Committee on Education for the Deaf, which was responsible for establishing the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at RIT. The institute helps train deaf young people
for jobs in technology, provides internships and jobs, and assists them in moving off public assistance. He also served on the National Institute for the Deaf National Advisory Group for eight years.
Marsters is married and has three grown children-all hearing. Simply and modestly, Marsters sums up his many accomplishments, successes, and contributions in a very few words. “I am very pleased with the results of my life,” he says.