Talking Telephone for the Deaf

Witness Northern Ireland’s first telecommunications device for Deaf people

The TDD was invented by a deaf physicist Robert Weitbrecht and a deaf orthodontist James C. Marsters in 1964. Before email or texting this was a breakthrough in communications for people with hearing impairments. Like these modern counterparts it had its own vocabulary of commonly used abbreviations for example SKSK now hanging up and XXXX for a typing error. See the first such device in Northern Ireland in action, learn how it works and how it has helped the people who use it.

This material is Courtesy of the UTV Archive.