Safe Toddles

20th Century
The 1900s was a time of revolutionary inventions. Inventions in the early 1900s included the radio and phonograph, devices used to teach, entertain, and inform graduates of residential schools for the blind. The telephone, steam engine, electricity, the light bulb, computers, cell phones, long canes and ROCKET SHIPS TO THE MOON were all invented in the 1900s…just no device for keeping blind babies safe.

History of EI/O&M part 1: The piano was invented in the 1700s, and in the 1800s students at residential schools for the blind were taught to play professionally or to be piano tuners. In the 1700s, Ben Franklin invented bi-focal eyeglasses for people whose vision could be corrected with lenses. Yet, in the 1700s, learned men who were blind could not even conceive of the idea that one should make a safety device to protect blind babies when they moved about freely.