More Info: Dyslexic Inventor James Russell

James Russell and his family were very generous talking with for our book, The Dyslexic Advantage. Their stories are fascinating one many levels but especially of their long-term vision and innovation in the face of what seemed insurmountable odds.

James' parents were not inventors, but his father was a very successful farmer in Washington state who was the first to install a homogenizer and pasteurizer in the Northwest. He also started making ice cream without gelatin or extenders, and this turned out to be a great commercial success. James' mother started her career as a nurse.

As a child, James told us his interests consisted of "running around in the woods and taking things apart." He loved collecting old radios and also made radio controlled boats.

Although a natural scientist, James' first experiences with Science were disappointing because his teachers couldn't go into the depth that he was interested in, and he would have to wait until high school to study Physics.

Us: Were you a math kid?

James Russell: No...it was something of a struggle to learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and that sort of thing. I devised various schemes –particularly multiplication to figure out what the answer was without having to memorize the times'...

Us: I would’ve thought that physics and electronics is rules…it’s not?

James Russell: No, it’s visual

Barbara Russell: In Trigonometry – you have to memorize all the trig functions – Jim found it easier to derive them each time rather than memorize them.

Us: How is it visual?

James Russell: If you’re talking about circuits, the electrons are going this way (gesturing), then there’s resistance (gesturing) and the storage capacitors (more gesturing) and the Philip capacitors.

Us: So a lot of movement, right?

James Russell: Yep. Sure.

Us: Now there was a story about Tesla where he had said if he were building a machine, he could imagine it in his mind so clearly that he could manipulate it and tweak it to see what would happen. He said he could perform experiments in his mind. Do you have something like that?

James Russell: Sure.

Eides: How detailed are the visual images. Can you see them like pictures or do you have a sense of relationship and their kinetic properties. Are they color images?

James Russell: That’s a tough one to answer. That depends on what level. If we’re talking about building something like a chair, then it’s all detail visual. I’ve got a 2 by 4 and put another 2 by 4. I’ll nail it this way and so forth. If it’s something more technical, then there are still images, but they aren’t exact images. It's an image type-thought. It's not a specific image.

It’s an image type –thought. But it’s not a specific image. It isn’t an image what I’m dealing with. It’s imaging but I can’t find words to say that I can’t put them into words.

Us: Do the images do what they do on their own or are you able to manipulate them?

James Russell: Manipulate them.

Part of Russell's story that was remarkable was how many people seemed skeptical of what he proposed to do with the formation of the first compact disc. There were some who told him that there was no market for a digitized record (45's and LP's are just fine) while others who thought the translation of sound into numbers would just make "noise". He even had one person tell him, "If this was a good idea, IBM would've invented it."

But Russell was an audiophile. He loved music and he realized how suboptimal records with their pops, hisses, and scratches were.

In the end, Russell would earn 22 patents for his creation of the first compact disc. He invented the cd in 1965, but it didn't become popular until it was mass produced by Sony in 1980.

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