<v Speaker 1>The next time you're out on the interstate and you

<v Speaker 1>set your car to hold the steady speed, you press

<v Speaker 1>that little button, lift your foot off the gas, and

<v Speaker 1>the car just holds the line at seventy while you

<v Speaker 1>relax your leg. Stop and consider the man you have

<v Speaker 1>to thank for that convenience. He engineered it down to

<v Speaker 1>the last gear in spring, and he did it all

<v Speaker 1>without ever seeing a road, a dashboard or the speedometer.

<v Speaker 1>He built the whole thing to control because he had

<v Speaker 1>been blind since the age of five. From Hey Dad Productions,

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway and this is Anonymous America. Ralph Teeter

<v Speaker 1>was born in eighteen ninety in the small town of Hagerstown, Indiana,

<v Speaker 1>into a family of machinists. When he was only five

<v Speaker 1>years old, he was working with a knife and his

<v Speaker 1>hand slipped. The blade cost him the sight in one eye,

<v Speaker 1>and within a year, through a cruel complication, the other

<v Speaker 1>eye went dark as well, and Ralph would live the

<v Speaker 1>rest of his long life in total blindness. But his

<v Speaker 1>family made a decision that shaped everything that followed. They

<v Speaker 1>refused to treat Ralph as fragile. They put tools in

<v Speaker 1>his hands and taught him the machinist's trade the same

<v Speaker 1>way they would have taught a sighted boy, and he

<v Speaker 1>developed something remarkable to compensate for the lack of sight,

<v Speaker 1>a sense of touch that was so precise and a

<v Speaker 1>memory so exact that he could hold the blueprint of

<v Speaker 1>an entire machine in his mind and feel a flaw

<v Speaker 1>that a sighted man would miss. By the age of twelve,

<v Speaker 1>he had built a working automobile in the family shop.

<v Speaker 1>It was a small gasoline powered car that reached about

<v Speaker 1>twelve miles an hour. He went on to the University

<v Speaker 1>of Pennsylvania and earned a degree in mechanical engineering in

<v Speaker 1>nineteen twelve, becoming the first blind engineer on record in

<v Speaker 1>the United States. During World War One, Ralph's hands did

<v Speaker 1>work that sighted engineers couldn't do as reliably. He balanced

<v Speaker 1>the delicate turbine rotors used in the engines of Navy

<v Speaker 1>torpedo boat destroyers, judging by feel alone whether a spinning

<v Speaker 1>part was true. Now the Tee your family business was

<v Speaker 1>a company that made piston rings, those small, precise components

<v Speaker 1>that seal an engine, and it made them so well

<v Speaker 1>that it eventually took the name Perfect Circle. Ralph rose

<v Speaker 1>to be the head engineer at Perfect Circle, and in

<v Speaker 1>nineteen forty six became its president. But his mind never

<v Speaker 1>stopped working on problems, and the problem that would define

<v Speaker 1>his legacy came to him not in the shop, but

<v Speaker 1>in the passenger seat of a car. In nineteen thirty six,

<v Speaker 1>Ralph was riding with his friend and patent attorney, a

<v Speaker 1>man who had a maddening habit behind the wheel. As

<v Speaker 1>they talked, the attorney would drift faster while he was

<v Speaker 1>listening and slow down while he was speaking, or the

<v Speaker 1>other way around. So the car was forever surging and easing,

<v Speaker 1>surging and easing, And for a man whose entire life

<v Speaker 1>was built on precision and consistency, whose hands demanded that

<v Speaker 1>machines behave predictably, it was almost unbearable. Somewhere on that

<v Speaker 1>lurching drive, he thought there ought to be a device

<v Speaker 1>that just holds a car at the speed you choose

<v Speaker 1>and keeps it there. And he spent the next decade

<v Speaker 1>building exactly that. He filed his first patent for the

<v Speaker 1>device in nineteen forty eight. It used the dial on

<v Speaker 1>the dashboard connected down through the drive shaft to a

<v Speaker 1>mechanism that held the throttle steady keeping the car at

<v Speaker 1>whatever speed the driver selected. He called it the speedo

<v Speaker 1>stat and the automakers lined up to see it. Chrysler

<v Speaker 1>was the first to put it in a car in

<v Speaker 1>nineteen fifty eight, offering it on its luxury Imperial, New

<v Speaker 1>Yorker and Windsor models, marketed fittingly for something that drove

<v Speaker 1>the car for you as autopilot. The following year, Cadillac

<v Speaker 1>offered it too, under a planer name that would outlast

<v Speaker 1>all the others. They called it Cruise Control. Ralph held

<v Speaker 1>more than forty patents. By the end of his life.

<v Speaker 1>He served as the National president of the Society of

<v Speaker 1>Automotive Engineers. A blind man who had never seen a

<v Speaker 1>car elect did by the sighted men who designed and

<v Speaker 1>built them. He kept tinkering with things all the way

<v Speaker 1>into his nineties, and he died in nineteen eighty two

<v Speaker 1>at the age of ninety one, in the same corner

<v Speaker 1>of Indiana where his hand had slipped on a knife

<v Speaker 1>eighty six years before. There's an irony in Ralph's story

<v Speaker 1>that's almost too neat to be true. A man who

<v Speaker 1>never once drove a car, who couldn't read the speedometer,

<v Speaker 1>never saw a single mile of the roads he was

<v Speaker 1>thinking about. Gave every other driver in America the ability

<v Speaker 1>to stop watching theirs. He never called blindness a handicap.

<v Speaker 1>It was just the way he saw the world with

<v Speaker 1>his hands. So the next time your car holds the

<v Speaker 1>line while you rest your foot and make a phone

<v Speaker 1>call or talk to the people in the car with you,

<v Speaker 1>remember that it was designed entirely by a man who

<v Speaker 1>lived most of his life in the dark. That's Ralph Teeter,

<v Speaker 1>and that's anonymous America.