If you have ever sent a text, read an audiobook, or sipped from a bendy straw, then you have used something created for and by a disabled person. There are several inventions thought up and brought to life by disabled people, but would you have ever thought a blind person could have invented a universal car part?
Look no further than Ralph Teetor. Born in 1890 in Indiana, Teetor went blind in one eye after an accident at age 5, his other eye also going blind within a year due to a condition called “sympathetic opthalmia”. He grew up in a family known for their manufacturing company making bicycle parts and eventually automobile engines. He honed his sense of touch which helped him throughout his life. He attended university from 1908 to 1912 graduating with a bachelors in mechanical engineering— this was at a time when most schools would not have even considered his application. Buy the time he graduated and had gone back to his hometown, he had already developed a balancing system for the turbines in US warships. He worked at the family business creating circle pistons where he became lead engineer and eventually President of the company.
The story goes that his driver, who chauffeured Teetor around, was notorious for speeding up or slowing down depending on how animated he got in conversation. The inconsistency of his chauffeur’s driving is said to have led Teetor to develop a mechanism for controlling speeds. Although this makes for an interesting story, the more likely reason had to do with World War II. The US had imposed a speed limit of 35 miles per hour to conserve gas and tire rubber for the war. Faster driving speeds was also leading to far worse automobile accidents which, as the president of a car company was a concern of Teetor’s.
He envisioned a mechanism that the driver could engage to control their speed and soon he developed the “Speedostat” which he received the patent for in August 1950. Within 5 years he had improved the “Stat” to include a speed locking function. By 1958 Chrysler was the first car manufacturer to offer the “Stat” in their luxury cars, but within a year they were offering the “Stat” in all the models of their cars. General Motors began including it in their Cadillac models, revamping and renaming it “Cruise Control”.
In 1973 an oil embargo left the United States in a gas crisis, and Teetor’s gas conserving invention, “Cruise Control”, was soon offered in every US-made vehicle. Eventually it was in automobiles worldwide. Teetor retired, selling his company in 1963, just as cruise control was taking off. Over the next two decades he developed arthritis which affected his sense of touch. He died in 1982, but his invention is still a main part in vehicles to this day. With the advancements in self-driving cars, thanks in part to Teetor’s innovations in the automotive industry, we are well on the way to allowing blind people to pilot their own vehicles. This is something likely even Teetor never expected, but without the Speedostat none of it would have ever been possible.
So, the next time you are in a car and the driver puts on cruise control think of Ralph Teetor and how as a blind man he created one of the twentieth century’s most important inventions.
Written by Tyler Harris
Source: Sears, David. “The Sightless Visionary Who Invented Cruise Control”. Project Air. 2017)