[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 62 (Thursday, April 29, 2010)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E721]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             JOHN E.D. BALL

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, April 29, 2010

  Mr. WOLF. Madam Speaker, I call to the attention of the House the 
passing on March 25 of John E.D. Ball, 77, a resident of Vienna, 
Virginia, who was the founding president of the National Captioning 
Institute and two-time national Emmy Award winner for his television 
engineering work.
  Mr. Ball was a native of Glasgow, Scotland. An avid electronics buff 
as a teenager, he was a graduate of Glasgow's Royal College of Science 
and Technology. He served two years in the Royal Air Force as a radio 
signaller and 13 years with the BBC. Recruited by Computer Sciences 
Corporation, he and his family arrived in the United States in 1966. He 
joined the Public Broadcasting Service in 1971 and helped implement the 
first domestic satellite distribution system. Completed in 1978, the 
project won Mr. Ball his first Emmy award for engineering.
  His interest in developing closed captioning for television programs 
was spawned in 1972 when he attended a briefing at Gallaudet College 
(now Gallaudet University) and was struck by the enthusiasm from the 
largely deaf audience following a demonstration by ABC-TV and the 
National Bureau of Standards of a subtitling system for the deaf. He 
worked over the next 7 years at PBS to make closed caption television a 
reality and in 1980 accepted on behalf of PBS a second national 
engineering Emmy Award.
  Mr. Ball's effort led to the establishment later that year of the 
National Captioning Institute, a nonprofit that worked to expand the 
availability of closed captioning, for which Mr. Ball served as the 
founding president and chief executive officer for 15 years. At the 
urging of NCI and others, Congress passed the Television Decoder 
Circuitry Act in 1990 that required new televisions with screens larger 
than 13 inches to be equipped with closed-captioning technology. Today 
the ``talking TV'' logo has become one of the most recognizable symbols 
in the country.
  For his exceptional dedication and work, Mr. Ball was awarded an 
honorary degree from Gallaudet University and also received a 
distinguished service award from the American-Speech-Language-Hearing 
Association.
  Madam Speaker, we extend our sympathies to Mr. Ball's family, 
including his wife, the former Elizabeth Rodger of Vienna, Virginia; 
three sons, Norman Ball of Leesburg, Adrian Ball of Arlington County 
and Evan Ball of Vienna; and a grandson.

                          ____________________