Dr. James Marsters, inventor of TTY, dies

OAKLAND, Calif., Aug. 23 (UPI) -- Dr. James Marsters, a deaf orthodontist who helped cobble together the first text telephones in his California garage, has died at 85, his son said.

James Marsters Jr. told The New York Times his father died of natural causes on July 28 at his home in Oakland.

Marsters, deaf from scarlet fever, was able to graduate from college and dental school using sign language and lip reading. But his son said he was frustrated by his inability to talk on the telephone.

"All of us in the family, whenever a call came for my dad, we picked up this handset attached to the

phone so that we could listen in and relay to my father what the caller was saying," the son told the Times on Friday. "He would read our lips and then reply in his own voice."

Marsters, Robert Weitbrecht, a Stanford University physicist, and later Andrew Saks, an electrical engineer from the family that founded Saks Fifth Avenue, succeeded in the 1960s in converting old teletype machines to the first TTY phones.

The three men also lobbied successfully for communications policies allowing relay services for the deaf to connect directly to phone lines.