Collective Creation: Disabled Innovation and the British Post Office

How did disabled innovation drive technological development in twentieth-century Britain? The project will answer this question by focusing on how disabled expertise was integrated into telecommunication technologies built by the British Post Office for disabled ex-servicemen and responauts (respirator users). The first project strand will concentrate on the development of adapted telecommunications technologies used to integrate disabled soldiers into the workforce after the First World War. During the interwar years the Post Office worked closely with various industries to adapt and create technological fixes that allowed disabled exservicemen to work in industry, notably as telephone operators. Post Office engineers enthusiastically designed new ways of using the exchange to try and assist these operators but did not always succeed in anticipating the ways that these operators were using sound and touch to do this job. The second will focus on how 'responauts' actively collaborated with the British Post Office to ensure equitable access to telephony. Responauts' technological interdependence meant that they adapted an extraordinary variety of technologies to live well with respirators and modify their personal environment. These technologies were discussed by contributors to the Responaut - a quarterly magazine published in Britain between 1963 and 1989. This project will show how individual inventions were galvanised by this user network to become 'disabled expertise' and explore the extent to which this expertise was commodified by state and private interests. This will enable a new case study exploration of the nature of invention and collaborative design in the British context.