Helen Keller and the Glove That Couldn’t Hear

September 22, 2014

(The Atlantic) – On the second day of March 1950, Helen Keller showed up at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. There, she encountered Norbert Wiener, the mathematician and engineer best known as the father of cybernetics. It was a meeting of two of the century’s greatest minds. Wiener had an invention he thought would revolutionize how deaf people experienced the world: a glove that could channel the sound of the human voice into the wearer’s fingertips. A glove that could, in essence, hear for them.