VISION FOR BLIND

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 152, 13 June 1932, Page 4

VISION FOR BLIND

CLAIM FOR NEW APPARATUS. Seeing without eyes is claimed to have been placed within the range of possibility by an apparatus invented by a Vienna architect, Joseph Gartlaruber, and demonstrated in Vienna recently to newspapermen and doctors. Herr Gartlartiber has been working for years on the theory that vision is caused by “b'i-pblar equalisation of organic electrical tension,” maintaining that human beings in principle do not see with their eyes, which are actually only natural electric photographic cells activated by differences cf light intensity. He concluded that persons who were blind because of defects of their eyes or their optic qerves could be made to see artificially.

With the help of a blind physician, Dr. Fritz Guggi, Herr Gartlaruber constructed an apparatus consisting of a sort of small goggle-like mass that he said would collect electrical waves o( light like tho tens of tho eye and transmit them over the nerves to the brain. Since the use of the apparatus necessitates keeping the natural electrical field of the body highly charged, the subjects of the experiments were first subjected to electrical currents.

On being blindfolded and donning tho apparatus, a man with normal vision declared ho could distinguish when the lights were turned on, of the position of a lamp near him. A woman who had been blind for 48 years said she could distinguish between light and darkness, and.another who had been able only to perceive light declared she could see clearly three feet away. The inventor himself says he can read a newspaper by means of the apparatus.