Breedlove just happened to have been in several right places, all at the right times.īreedlove and Frantz had participated in the development of Little Professor, a calculator-with-a-twist that TI introduced in 1976. The basic idea for an educational spelling toy was Breedlove’s. In an interview, Frantz recalls that it’s just possible the team may have neglected to properly expense a few things to keep the official cost tally low. Fortunately for them, though, it just so happened the Speak & Spell was the only consumer-targeted project at TI at that particular moment that was within its budget (two of the others were a CB radio and a home computer). They somehow forgot to mention to TI management that they had encountered surprising antipathy to the idea, even where one might have expected warm endorsement.

When they test-marketed it, parents were dismissive.īut Paul Breedlove, Gene Frantz, Larry Brantingham, and Richard Wiggins were having fun building it, and didn’t want to stop. When the four described it to one of the nation’s top experts in spelling education, he essentially advised them to kill it. Texas Instruments management saw little value in the project. Before the Speak & Spell was introduced, hardly anybody other than the four engineers who developed it thought it should be introduced.

Dane cook speek and spell