History of Early Intervention O&M: The True Origin Story of the Long Cane, O&M and Pre-cane Skills
- Grace Ambrose-Zaken
- Apr 28, 2024
- 9 min read
Updated: Oct 22
The origin story of the field of Orientation and Mobility (O&M) could easily be the plot of a Hollywood film—complete with heroes, hardship, and hard-won innovation. It begins with the blind veterans of World War II, men who returned home with the same unwavering belief in democracy and equality that had guided them on the battlefield. This time, however, they fought for a different freedom: the right to walk safely and independently in a sighted world.
From Symbol to Safety: The Lions Club Cane
Our film might open with a scene of young blind veterans on an American street, waving short white-and-red canes—the Lions Club cane. Designed to signal blindness to sighted pedestrians and drivers, it was never intended to keep its user safe. “When the blind person crosses a street let him extend it so that everyone can see and be aware of his blindness,” wrote Martin and Kleinfelder (2008).
But waving a short cane in the air could not detect curbs, steps, or drop-offs. Veterans quickly realized what this meant: they were still unprotected. Many refused to accept a tool that only labeled them as blind without preventing injury. They demanded something better.
Pictured below, a man and a woman demonstrate the Lions Club 'street crossing technique'. Note that by holding the short white cane in the air, they will be unable to know the exact location of the up-curb until they find it with their feet, a tripping hazard.
The Real Dangers of Walking Blind
This demand wasn’t new. Blind people throughout history had been expected to move independently without sufficient protection. In his 1962 autobiography, To Catch an Angel, Russell recalled venturing out alone for the first time as a twelve-year-old student of the New York Institute for the Blind in 1936—without any cane at all.
“Stumbling over curbs and running into lampposts… after banging into nine hundred baby carriages, we finally made our way to the dime store.”
For Russell, collisions were seen as natural—just part of being blind. This normalization of injury reveals how unsafe mobility had long been accepted as the unavoidable cost of independence for people born blind.
Russell described some of the perils he and his New York Institute for the Blind classmates experienced learning to ride the New York City subway on their own without any protection from or ability to detect mobility hazards, he remembered learning orientation was easy:
"We learned on which side the doors opened at each stop, where the curves in the track were, and at what stations we would hear a bell and what it meant" (Russell, 1962, p. 66). For them, sudden injury was harder to contend with.
The boys insisted it was mostly their own fault for falling into the gap between the train floor and the platform:
"Sometimes we made mistakes. Fortunately, they were usually unimportant, such as getting off at the wrong station to make connection with another line. But some times they were more serious. Some fellows, for example, either did not know how, or were simply careless about stepping off the Seventh Avenue at 177 Street. In some places there was a gap of ten or twelve inches between the train and the platform, and ignorance or carelessness frequently resulted in a bruised shin or a twisted ankle...Sometimes, though, accidents were the result of just plain bad luck (Russell, 1962, p. 66).
Touch: The True Vision of Independent Mobility
Walking is a sensorimotor skill—it depends on sensory feedback and motor control working together. For sighted people, vision provides continuous information about the path ahead. For blind people, that information must come through touch. A proper mobility tool, when in contact with the ground, translates tactile feedback through the hand to the brain. It’s like reading Braille through the feet—except that a misread “dot” can lead to serious injury.
Judy Dixon, who lost her vision at birth, didn’t begin using a long cane until graduate school. In 1980s Washington, D.C., she fell through an open manhole—despite using her cane correctly. The long cane provided the feedback she needed to avoid most hazards, but it was no guarantee against the unpredictability of urban environments. Her experience underscores how crucial consistent tactile feedback is for safety, and how dangerous it remains to walk without adequate protection.
For example, below is a picture of a blind High School Senior approaching a descending stair without a long cane filmed in 1966. This film was intended to highlight the progress in teaching safe mobility to blind teens, yet they show multiple examples of blind children approaching stairs without any independent, physical means to detect the exact location of the drop off. Russell and Dixon's stories illuminate for us, it is unsafe not to know exactly where and how deep the drop-off is.
Sighted or blind falling hurts!
Blinded WWII vets in their twenties were not as gullible as children who were born blind. These men did not accept the precarious "stumble and crash" strategy of getting about town (Bledsoe, 2010).
When told that overcoming fear of injury was the only path to independence as blind men, they resoundingly and emphatically rejected this ending to their heroic tale. The men who had helped to defeat Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito had absolute faith in American ingenuity to overcome every obstacle, including this one.
Inventors Before Their Time: Gilbert & Levy
Long before the WWII veterans, two 19th-century innovators—Elizabeth Gilbert and William Hanks Levy—developed what we now recognize as the constant contact cane technique. Blinded in early childhood, they spent years refining the use of a specially designed long walking stick.
In 1872, Levy published Blindness and the Means of Its Prevention, co-authored in spirit with Gilbert, describing how the cane’s tip should “always examine the ground before being actually trodden.” Their method emphasized a side-to-side sweeping motion, ensuring the area ahead of each foot was checked before stepping forward. This technique was, in essence, the first scientifically described system for safe, independent blind travel.
They described its shape, how to determine the correct length, and their system for systematically checking the surface
"...about six to nine inches from the feet, the ground will always be examined before being actually trodden (p. 70). They called it a "stick" but, please do not picture a branch off a tree.
Their stick was a well-crafted, elongated walking stick that was repurposed for safe mobility. It had a handle "somewhat like a hook, and sufficiently large to be grasped firmly, so that it may not easily be knocked out of the hand..." and "...suited to the height of the individual, but it should be longer than what would be used..." as a support cane. And "...it should always have a good ferrule*..." (Levy, 1872, p. 70). (*a ferrule is a metal cap or band placed on a wooden pole to prevent splitting) .
Gilbert & Levy described their long cane technique as "waving the stick alternately from right to left to correspond with the movements of the feet.” They explained that they made sure the width of the arc checked the ground ahead of the leading foot with each step (Levy, 1872, p. 70). There is no film of their cane technique, but they described the easiest, most natural way to syncopate the swinging of a long cane with one's pace.
WWII and the Birth of Modern O&M
In 1944, U.S. Army Sergeant Richard Hoover built upon Levy and Gilbert’s method while training blinded soldiers at Valley Forge Hospital. Hoover’s “lightweight long cane” and the two-point touch technique were military in precision—requiring users to tap the cane alternately left and right in rhythm with their steps.
Hoover, along with Dr. Bledsoe and blinded veteran Russ Williams, formalized the first Orientation and Mobility program in 1945. The sequence prioritized orientation (knowing where you are) before mobility (how to move safely)—a reflection of sighted instructors’ anxieties about getting lost, rather than blind travelers’ real fear of injury.
The long cane technique was understood to be quite difficult to master
Bledsoe (1977) explained on John Chester's radio show “Dialogue Today,” that the two-point touch cane technique is actually quite difficult to learn to use correctly as:
"Long cane use has to be taught and carefully taught in conditions and situations in which blind travelers go. One of the first things we discovered is that no one picks up a cane and touches in front of the trailing foot naturally. In fact, it takes hours and hours of training to get blind people to do it that way. It seems to be the opposite of conditioned reflex."
The Hoover technique was a product of good Army training. The originators of the field of O&M had all served in the US Army and endured endless hours of drilling, learning to walk with precision. When faced with the task of training blind soldiers to use a long cane to walk independently, what resulted resembled a long cane 'marching' technique; taping the cane with the precision sufficient to befit the uniform.
Tapping the long cane back and forth is less safe than keeping the cane tip in constant contact with the ground as it is swept back and forth, known as the constant contact technique (Kim & Wall Emerson, 2018, Levy, 1872; Sauerburger, 2024). Gilbert & Levy described the action of waving the cane from side to side which sounds more like a description of the constant contact cane technique, than tapping.
The constant contact cane technique recommends the essential protective arc be traced on the ground instead of in the air. It is easier to learn than two-point touch, safer, and still currently in use today.
Pre-Cane Skills: A Misguided Beginning
Tragically, the Army’s instructional sequence began with what were called pre-cane skills—hand gestures and body postures meant to “protect” the face or torso without using a cane. In practice, these offered little more than false confidence. They were, as one might say, a rite of passage into danger, not a method of safety.
By the 1960s, these same “pre-cane” gestures were being taught to blind schoolchildren in classrooms across the United States. Photographs from the period show teenagers walking down hallways unaided, hailed as “independent travelers.” But without tactile feedback, every step remained a potential collision.
Exclusion from Innovation
While blind adults who lost their vision later in life gained access to the long cane and O&M training, children born blind were excluded. They were deemed too young or unready, their collisions dismissed as a lack of motivation rather than a lack of tools. In effect, the most vulnerable learners were left out of the very mobility revolution meant to protect them.
In the 1960s, pre-cane skills were taught to school-aged children. In the picture below, we see a high school boy who is blind walking down the middle of a school hallway without any protection at all. The caption of the picture indicates that this blind high schooler's ability to walk unaided was heralded as safe and confident moving by a blind child. The terrible irony is that no matter how safe it looks to sighted people, there is nothing safe about a blind child who can't see moving through space unprotected.
Reclaiming the True Purpose of Mobility
The guide dog and long cane remain the two great tools that restored safe, independent travel to blind adults. But the history of O&M is incomplete without acknowledging who was left behind—blind infants and toddlers still expected to move through space without protection.
Understanding this history makes one thing clear: the long cane’s greatest contribution was not merely its form, but its principle of constant tactile feedback. That principle, embodied today in innovations like the Pediatric Belt Cane, ensures that even the youngest children who are blind can safely explore, learn, and move independently..
References
Ambrose, G. (2000). Judith Dixon Oral history transcript (Interviewed on
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485). AFB Press.
Bledsoe, C.W. (1952). Resistance. C. Warren Bledsoe Manuscript Collection, AER
O&M Division C. Warren Bledsoe Archives, museum of the American Printing
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Chester, John, (1977). “Dialogue Today” C. Warren Bledsoe Manuscript
Collection, AER O&M Division C. Warren Bledsoe Archives, museum of the
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Hatlen, P. & Wurzburger, P., Collins, R, & Kellis, T. (1966). Film entitled From
Here To There. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X58hWwXd8XI&ab_channel=annetucson (Accessed May, 21, 2024).
Kim, D. S., & Wall Emerson, R. (2018). Obstacle detection with the long cane:
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Russell, R. (1962). To Catch an Angel: Adventures in the World I Cannot See.
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Sauerburger, D. (Accessed May, 19, 2024) www.sauerburger.org/nodetect.htm
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