Wichitan reveals how he invented closed captioning
Story Created: February 25, 2009
WICHITA, Kansas – Wichita is home to some fascinating people –
some famous, some not. It’s also home to a man little heard of, but
his work has certainly been noticed by all.
To say Bill Kastner loves electronics would be an understatement. His
basement is filled with old radios and other gadgets that would look
more at home in a museum. He likes his entertainment old school – no
Facebook or chat rooms. Bill does his social networking using a ham
radio and Morse code.
“In high school I had a stammering problem, so I resorted to Morse
code and that was a means of talking to people without having the
stammering problem,” Kastner said.
That childhood infatuation with radios led Kastner to pursue a career
in electronics and he eventually earned his masters degree in
electrical engineering from K-State.
After working on memory systems for the Minuteman Missile back in the
60’s, Bill moved his family to Dallas where he started working for
Texas Instruments.
“Thirty-two years have passed — I guess it’s time to come out and
say I did something with my life,” he said.
What he did with his life some 32 years ago at Texas Instruments has
had a profound effect on everyone’s life. Bill is the guy who
developed and built the very first decoder that makes closed
captioning on television possible.
“I designed original closed captioning decoder, other than my
manager there were only two people that really designed the original
closed caption mediums scale logic,” he said. “I did the logic and
the other guy was Joe Lynn, who did the interface to the television
set.”
In the mid 1970’s Public Broadcasting contracted with Texas
Instruments to design a device that would allow the deaf to read what
was being said on air. The test for the Texas Instruments team was to
decode a message.
“We had to decode that,” Bill said. “One thing that happened
was that PBS would not tell us on this tape they gave us what the
message was. For the first decoded information and it turns out when
we go the decoder running, it was ‘float like a butterfly, sting
like a bee.’”
Bill’s decoder worked perfectly, but what he didn’t take into
account was how widely popular closed captioning would become.
“We thought in the beginning that there would be a decoder box that
was sold at the time through Sears that would cost $250 and there
would be a limited amount of those in the world,” he said. “We
never expected that FCC would declare in July of 1993 that all TV’s
13 inches or larger would have a closed caption decoder built into
them.”
Now, everywhere he looks his invention is looking back.
“One of the interesting things is that I work out at the YMCA three
times a week and I can sit there and look at the TV’s on the display
in front of me and think I did that, but yet I can’t turn to the
person next to me and say, ‘Hey, I did that,’” he said. “No
way. They wouldn’t believe that.”
He’s really quite humble and shy even when asked about the role he
played in broadcasting. In fact, people who have known him for years
didn’t know that he helped create closed captioning.
But he’s equally content knowing that his work has helped bring
words to those who could only see pictures.
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