Excerpt from: Media dis&dat (click for full article)
The three Boulder researchers credited with
developing closed captioning never set out to change the lives of the
hearing-impaired.
In the early 1970s, Jim Jespersen (pictured), a physicist,
and engineers George Kamas and Dick Davis were working in the Time and
Frequency Division at the National Bureau of Standards. (The name of the
institution was changed in 1988 to National Institute of Standards and
Technology.)
The men were studying the spectrum usage of
television broadcasts. To increase availability of accurate time
signals, they developed a way to hide time codes in broadcast television
transmission.
That original project was abandoned because of the
emergence of GPS (global positioning system) and other technologies,
which proved better in delivering accurate time signals, according to
engineer John Lowe of the Time and Frequency division at NIST.
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