New Help for the Sightless

Abstract

Duke Lumsden operates a candy shop in Tacoma, Wash. Duke is blind, yet he has no trouble differentiating between the values of currency he handles in the course of business. He is aided by a spinoff from space-developed optical-electronic scanning technology known as the Paper Money Identifier. The PMI is manufactured by EMR Ltd., Los Angeles. It's not distinguishable by the human eye, but each denomination of American currency has a unique distribution of colors. This fact enables the PMI to tell the difference between different denominations of paper money. The device, the size of a cigarette pack, emits a narrow beam of invisible infrared light. This beam reacts to the reflectivity of the colors on the bill and causes an oscillator to generate an audible signal. As Duke passes his PMI lengthwise along the back of a bill, he hears a distinctive series of tones that identifies each denomination. Duke Lumsden is very pleased with the paper money identifier, which he got through Tacoma's Technology Transfer Center. He not only handles paper money with ease, but he has discovered another use for the device. Before receiving the PMI, he had difficulty operating his tape recorder because he couldn't determine which track the tape was using; now his PMI tells him, by reacting to the different colors on the switch button light.