February 24, 2026
When books started singing
Optophone
Early ‘singing text machine’ had people literally listening to letters
TLDR: A 1913 device called the Optophone let blind readers “hear” printed text as musical tones, up to a slow 60 words per minute. Commenters are torn between admiring the early accessibility tech, mocking it as pre–Speak & Spell chaos, and debating whether anyone could stay sane listening to sentences as sound effects.
Move over, text-to-speech robots — more than 100 years ago, the Optophone was already trying to sing books into people’s ears. This 1913 gadget scanned printed text and turned each letter into a chord of sounds so blind readers could “hear” the words. But while the history is wild, the internet is here for one thing only: roasting and romanticizing it.
One commenter dryly summed it up as the prequel to kids’ toys, joking it was basically “before Speak & Spell,” turning a groundbreaking invention into a retro meme. Another wondered if this whole thing was a sneak joke about modern artificial intelligence, asking if it was a “lighthearted jab” at today’s computer vision tools that also break images into little pieces, like tokens, for machines to understand. The nerds saw philosophy where others saw beeps.
The real debate, though, exploded around just how painful it would be to listen-read at only 60 words per minute. One reader, channeling sci‑fi novel vibes, confessed that trying to understand a whole language in tones and chords alone sounds fascinating but also “frustrating” as hell. Meanwhile, another commenter calmly flexed history knowledge, pointing out that this “measuring ink through a slot” idea later came back in bank check codes, turning the thread into a surprising origin story for boring financial tech. From proto-accessibility hero to sonic torture device to ancestor of your bank’s check reader, the Optophone just got its internet redemption arc — with plenty of side-eye.
Key Points
- •The optophone converts printed text into time-varying tone chords to enable reading by blind users.
- •Invented in 1913 by Dr. Edmund Fournier d’Albe at Birmingham University using selenium photosensors.
- •Barr and Stroud (Glasgow) improved the device’s resolution and usability.
- •Early reading speeds were extremely slow (about 1 word per minute in a 1918 demonstration by Mary Jameson).
- •Later models achieved up to approximately 60 words per minute for some users.