An Inventor Whose Blindness Was Just a Legal Technicality
By STEPHEN MILLER
Sam Genensky liked watching baseball, birds and women -- not necessarily in
that order. So it might have come as a surprise to those who never met him
that Mr. Genensky was legally blind.
A RAND Corp. mathematician who had been left almost sightless by an accident in
infancy, Mr. Genensky developed a system for projecting magnified text
on video screens that has helped millions of the partially sighted people
around the world to read.
"The technology had a dramatic impact," says Mitch Pomerantz, president of the
American Council of the Blind. "Up until then, people with low vision had
no alternatives, except perhaps magnifying glasses, and they were clunky."
Mr. Genensky, who died June 26 at age 81, always resisted being treated as
sightless, even though his 20-1,000 vision in his one functioning eye made him
blind by law. That didn't stop him from being a fan of the impressionists, even
if he had to view canvasses one piece at a time and mentally reassemble
them.
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Los Angeles Times
Samuel Genensky, who created solutions for the blind, would observe paintings
one section at a time and then reassemble them mentally.
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Tributes.com.As a child, he balked at Braille and spoke of his one year at a
school
for the blind as a prison sentence. In his teens, he discovered how to modify a
pair of binoculars his dad brought home from World War I so that he could
see the blackboard in class and take notes. He went on to graduate with honors
from Brown University and returned to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1958.
At RAND in Santa Monica, Calif., he programmed early computers, and modeled
fluid dynamics and spontaneous combustion. But he continued to be dogged by
his limited vision that made reading into a neck-craning chore. He described
the way he read as "nosing."
The problem was that programs were geared toward the totally blind. The
Veterans Administration offered white-cane training and guide dogs to servicemen
blinded in World War II. But despite the fact that the majority of the legally
blind have at least a limited capacity to see, there was little help for
those whose vision was severely impaired but could be improved with technology.
"People seem to want blind people to conform to the image of blind men, even if
the person can see," Mr. Genensky told the Los Angeles Times in 1971.
His answer, constructed with the help of a team of RAND scientists and
engineers, was Randsight, the prototype for systems that project large text on a
video screen. Randsight presented text 31 times its original size when he first
demonstrated it at a convention of the American Academy of Optometry in
Los Angeles in 1968. A Reader's Digest feature in 1971 dubbed it "Sam
Genensky's Marvelous Seeing Machine," and generated thousands of inquiries from
around
the world.
Mr. Genensky declined to patent the invention to encourage other companies to
develop and manufacture video magnification systems. He said he could read
130 words a minute with his system, slow for a sighted adult, but a
near-miracle for many of the legally blind.
Says American Federation for the Blind President Carl Augusto, "Sam was
responsible for really bringing low vision into the mainstream."
The video systems were one of an array of solutions offered at the Los
Angeles-based Center for the Partially Sighted, which Mr. Genensky founded with
federal grants in 1978. The center continues to offer technology, as well as
psychological counseling.
Mr. Genensky himself used a pair of "monster binoculars" for reading signs, a
footlong spyglass for attending the ballet or sporting events, and an
odd-looking
compound lens mounted on glasses for walking the streets and "even
girl-watching," as he once said.
He traveled internationally to raise funds and bring attention to the cause of
the partially sighted, and did some counseling himself. Teenagers sometimes
resisted help.
"They say, 'I don't want to use that. It looks funny!'" Mr. Genensky told the
Los Angeles Times in 1990. "I say, 'I'm going to give you my 'it's fun to
be different' lecture."
To address another possible source of embarrassment, he developed what became a
California state standard for lavatory signage, a large triangle for the
men's room, a circle for the ladies.
As a result of cataract surgery in the early 1990s, Mr. Genensky's vision
improved dramatically for a time, and he was stunned to realize that his wife
was a redhead, not a brunette, as he'd thought. But the improvement was
temporary, and in recent years he'd had to dust off his Braille-reading skills.
Paul Baran, a scientist who worked on the team that developed the original
Randsight device, says the project came about almost on a whim. "Low vision
was not a subject RAND was interested in," says Mr. Baran. "We just thought Sam
was a great guy."
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