Jonathan Allen Obituary by marstonstudio

Jonathan Allen was a pioneer in synthesized speech and later became the director of MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics. I produced this story on a tight deadline and scrambled to find one of his contemporaries to tell his story; eventually I persuaded his wife to offer a story. A few days later I told my father about the challenge of producing the obituary and he told me “Oh I used to work with him! In the 1970s I was building an optical character recognition system and together we collaborated on a reading machine for the blind. You could have called me.”