R.
(Richard) Orin Cornett was born in
Driftwood, Oklahoma, a now unincorporated town near the Kansas border located in
Alfalfa County, on November 14, 1913. He earned his BS degree in mathematics from
Oklahoma Baptist University in 1934, followed by an MS from the
University of Oklahoma in 1937. In 1940, Cornett was awarded a Ph.D. in
physics and
applied mathematics from the
University of Texas at Austin, with his thesis entitled, “Acoustic Spectra of Edge Tones.” From 1935 to 1945, Dr. Cornett taught physics, mathematics, and electronics at Oklahoma Baptist,
Penn State, and
Harvard Universities. In 1959, Cornett became the director of the Division of Higher Education at the U.S. Office of Education. While in that position, upon the review of funding for Gallaudet College (present-day
Gallaudet University), he was appalled to discover that most
deaf persons had below grade level reading skills and fail to achieve
literacy at a native-level. In 1965, Cornett accepted a position as the Vice President for Long-Range Planning at Gallaudet. and during the 1970-1971 academic year he was the acting director of the Model Secondary School for the Deaf on the Gallaudet College campus. He was made a member of the faculty in 1966. The invention of Cued Speech in 1966 opened a new field within deaf education. His Cued Speech system was based on the hypothesis that if all the sounds in the spoken language could clearly be made to look different from each other coming from the lips of the speaker, those who were
hearing impaired would learn a language in much the same way as a hearing person, but through the use of their vision rather than acoustically. Of the system, Cornett stated, "A few months of study convinced me that the underlying cause of their
(deaf persons) reading problem was the lack of any reasonable way to learn spoken language, without which they could not use speech for communication, become good lipreaders, or learn to read (as opposed to being taught the recognition of each written word). So, I really started with the conclusion that what was needed was a convenient way to represent the spoken language accurately, through vision, in real time. That was the problem I set out to solve, the perceived need that set my direction.” Cornett died on December 17, 2002, in
Laurel, Maryland, at the age of 89. His wife of 59 years, Lorene, had died on January 21 of the same year. ==Recognition==