Word: witcher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sound or touch, but none has come into widespread use. They are generally too complicated, heavy, expensive or conspicuous. Dunn Engineering Associates, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass, is demonstrating a small, simple, inconspicuous device that may have more practical appeal. Its designer, the late Dr. Clifford Martin Witcher of M.I.T., was blind himself...
Physicist Witcher lost his sight when he was five years old, but blindness did not slow him down appreciably. He graduated from Georgia Tech, won a Ph.D. at Columbia. For sight he substituted an amazing ability to comprehend by ear. He grasped with ease the meaning of equations that he could not see; he designed complicated machinery without being able to draw or read a blueprint. Sighted students watched with wonderment while he worked with dangerous power tools...
During World War II, Dr. Witcher did distinguished work on radar. Later he turned to a scientific study of the special needs of blind people. This work took him to Haskins Laboratories, New York City, and later to M.I.T., where he concentrated on practical gadgets. The one demonstrated last week, the only one to be completed before Dr. Witcher's death last month, is called an Audible Vision Probe. It is about as big as a short, fattish fountain pen, and a thin wire leads from it to an earphone. At one end of the probe is a small...
Died. Viscount Astor, 73, onetime (1939-44) Lord Mayor of Plymouth, newspaper executive (the London Observer); of asthma; in Cliveden. A New York-born great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, he became a British subject when his father was naturalized in 1899, later married tart-tongued Nancy Witcher Langhorne of Greenwood, Va., who became the first woman to sit in the House of Commons (1919-45). Said he: "When I married Nancy, I hitched my wagon to a star; when she got into the House of Commons, I found I had hitched my wagon to a sort...