It was while were living in the early forties that my oldest sister, Anne, married my bother-in-law who had recently moved from Bluff Dale to Brownwood to work for Educational Laboratories in Brownwood. The company was making the first simple machine, which I recall as being known as a Metronoscope Reading Machi
These devises were unique in that they allowed the teachers in the classrooms to use stories and pictures, written or drawn on rolls of paper, about 3 feet in width, and which revolved in front of three windows on the machine that raised and lowered in sequence as the rolls turned. Controls on the equipment allowed the teacher to manipulate the speed at which these rolls turned and allowed the instructor to control the student’s speed of reading these rolls (or stories).
It was the first attempt at developing a computer-like device for use in the classroom that I ever knew about. This is the way I remember watching the use of the machines in my very early years of education. These machines had been manufactured and distributed by American Optical Company beginning in 1932 until they began to make them in Brownwood.
Aaron Edward Lamb, a Brownwood school teacher and later a Junior High Principal, was in charge of the testing of this equipment for Educational Laboratories and did much of this in his own classrooms. North Ward Elementary School, which I attended, made use of these machines on occasions, probably because the school was in the poor area of town and the school district was attempting to bring the lower functioning students up to the level of those on the more affluent South Side of Brownwood.
Many of us thought of the students from the South side of the city as being more financially stable because most had a father who held a job and many were purchasing the homes in which they were living. It took much less money to be considered to be affluent in the early years of my life than it did as I grew older.