50th Reunion Biography
Name: Lindsay Russell
Home address: 100 Memorial Drive
Apartment 11-22B
Cambridge, MA 02142-1334
Home phone: (617) 547-0819
E-mail: lindsayr@alum.mit.edu
Undergrad Living Gr'p: Theta Delta Chi
Undergrad Course: VI (Elec. Eng.)
Grad Degree: SM, MIT, Course VI, 1951
Have been self-employed for the past thirty-five years as an inventor/consultant, primarily in the field of electrical aids for the blind and deaf-blind. I keep open a small office/laboratory but consider myself essentially retired.
My military service (a year in Army Signal Corps) was accomplished between first and second freshman year terms; I ended my Army days as an instructor in WW II radar set SCR-584. Following my MIT days, I worked as an antenna engineer at local Andrew Alford Consulting Engineers for five years, then at local Hycon Eastern, Inc. (now part of Itek) in similar role.
In 1958 my then-boss Gerald Adams (now deceased) and I started Adams-Russell Company, where I remained for the next five years. The company's field was antenna design and manufacture at the time. After multiple mergers, Adams-Russell is finally a part of AMP, Inc.
In 1963 I set off on what I optimistically thought would be a two-year project: the development of an ultrasonic guidance device for the blind. This operation and related projects have kept me occupied for the remainder of my career. Developing many contacts and friends within the blind community has led me into projects associated with braille, devices for the deaf-blind and so on.
Other professional miscellany: hold five patents in antennas and blind guidance devices; was for three years a director of Morgan Memorial and am presently a trustee of National Braille Press of Boston.
The Memorial Drive apartment where I have lived for over forty years is surrounded by MIT—Sloan School on one side—Senior House on the other. One quickly gets drawn into Institute affairs in such a situation. For over thirty years, I was House Corporation President of my fraternity (Theta Delta Chi) and also served for nearly as long on the three-person IRDF Allocation Board, which authorizes low-interest loans to MIT fraternities and similar living groups. I have also long been involved in Class and other MIT goings-on and was recently presented the Bronze Beaver (award for services to MIT as alumnus).
For over thirty years my principal hobby has been hiking in the White Mountain Range of New Hampshire. I have hiked to the top of Mt. Washington over 200 times and to the top of smaller, nearby Mt. Monadnock over 400; it's great to get away from the city and climb up to a nice view. Count all hikes: they may number nearly a thousand. Sounds like an obsession! Also I run (jog, if you will) about 700 miles a year and enter a road race now and then. The only times I have ever won have been when there was a ``70-and-over'' age category.
Later I asked the Perkins teacher whether this kind of mishap occurred often. ``With the postwar cars, quite often;'' he replied; ``Their smooth curves don't echo back footsteps to warn. (Mine was a Studebaker ``dreamboat,'' a popular car at the time.)
The memory long stayed with me. Only months earlier I had operated Army radars and seen them track airplanes by echolocation, planes many miles away in darkness and fog, and thought it an incongruity that a blind lad could not be warned of an obstacle in his path only a few feet away. The Fifties passed; I was busy on military projects and cofounding a company in that field. From time to time, as a low-keyed hobby, I puttered with sonic devices I thought might lead to something useful for the blind, something that might enhance echos where Mother Nature failed. Meanwhile the vacuum tube shrank to become the transistor and ultrasonic transducers became tiny and cheap, now needed for TV remotes. Things came together in 1963, when I decided to develop a small ultrasonic sonar as a fulltime project to create a travel aid for the blind. A number of versions were made, each an improvement over the last, stemming from tests by blind volunteers. In common with other technical guidance devices, it came into little widespread use, but the project led me into the blind community, into braille programs and into developing devices for the deafblind.
(Even as schoolchildren, most Americans have heard of Helen Keller; yet most will live out their lives without ever encountering such a person: intelligent, but entirely without sight or hearing. There are 10,000 or so thus-handicapped in this nation alone.)
If the first twelve career years were spent in military electronics and the next thirty-five in technology for the handicapped, I keep wondering about those latter thirty-five years. Suppose I had parked differently that day in 1950 and had had no encounter with the blind youth?