Probably all Keepa’ninnies are familiar with James E. Talmage, the early 20th century apostle, chemist, geologist, author of Jesus the Christ and The Articles of Faith, among other works. He easily was one of the finest LDS minds of his generation.

James E. had a younger brother, Albert M., who is doubtless less familiar to you if, indeed, you have heard of him at all. Yet Albert was likely every bit as bright as James – a mechanical genius, an inventer, a humanitarian, and the publisher of a magazine for more than 40 years, and so probably responsible for disseminating more written words than his better-known older brother.

If you don’t know Albert M., it’s probably because his work was directed chiefly to the blind of the Church. Albert himself was blind.

While the Talmage family was still in their native England in 1873, when Albert was 6 and James was 11, James was finishing up some agricultural chores after dark. He had no idea his little brother was anywhere near him until Albert screamed and James turned to discover that “while in the act of pitching with the fork I had struck him with the tool, one tine piercing the ball of the left eye.” Albert’s eye was soon removed, but not before the right eye had lost its sight in a sympathetic reaction to the first injury. “I need say nothing in regard to my feelings and reflections at this mishap,” James later wrote; he was devoted to his younger brother for the rest of their lives.

The family emigrated to Utah in 1876 where there was no schooling or other assistance for the blind. Nevertheless, the Talmage parents succeeding in finding a dozen or more books embossed in line-writing – raised text, like Braille, but rather than a pattern of dots, the embossed characters were regular alphabetic letters, which a sighted person would have been able to read with the right light. Feeling his way along the raised letters, and with the aid of family members – no doubt including James – to read the words aloud to him at first, Albert taught himself to read.

In 1897, when Albert was 30, the University of Utah opened an extension in Ogden, the first Utah School for the Blind, and Albert moved to Ogden to study – but briefly, because that school was officially limited to the blind 21 years of age and younger. Following some additional work at Brigham Young Academy in Provo, Albert returned to Ogden as a teacher in the School for the Blind. He met there Miss Sara Whalen, from Brooklyn, New York, teacher of the blind, and introduced her to the Church. In 1905 the couple married, despite a considerable age difference (Sara was some 15 years older than Albert, not the 5 years older reflected in their FamilySearch listing).

A year before their marriage, Albert had gone to David O. McKay, president of the Weber Stake Academy at Ogden, to ask for McKay’s help in fulfilling a plan Albert had been working on for some time: to publish literature for blind Latter-day Saints. Room in the Academy building for a printing press was provided, and Albert went to work to collect the $700 necessary to buy a press and go into business.

The building of that press demonstrates Albert’s mechanical genius. The Deseret News had an old press where the inking mechanism no longer worked – it was useful only for embossing business cards and invitations in the Deseret News’s side business. Never having seen a press much less seen one in action, Albert figured out how to adapt the old, broken press to his own needs, including the development of a braking system that allowed him to adjust the speed with which the press worked, and adapting it to accept thin brass plates of the exact thickness he needed to print raised lettering suitable to the fingers of the blind.

In 1905, with the support of Joseph F. Smith, “The Society for the Aid of the Sightless” was incorporated in Utah. Albert was the society’s manager, and Sara was its secretary, positions they would hold for decades. Albert began publishing missionary tracts, LDS news, and other materials for the Mormon blind. With Sara’s help – she read the text aloud to him – Albert began the lengthy process of producing the Book of Mormon in multiple volumes of line-writing. Just as he finished II Nephi, though, developments in the larger world of the blind seemed to indicate that line-writing was on its way out, and Braille was poised to dominate. Albert ceased work on the Book of Mormon until the matter of competing raised-character systems worked itself out.

As they waited, Albert and Sara came up with the idea of a regular monthly magazine for the blind, featuring, as did all their work, Latter-day Saint material. The Messenger to the Sightless debuted in 1912, published at first in only 25 copies. Until Albert’s retirement in 1953 (Sara would die in 1932), The Messenger to the Sightless never missed a single issue, hand published by Albert in the basement of his Provo home, with circulation increasing beyond 400 copies per month.

Albert’s work was not limited to distributing the written word. Realizing that many people lost their sight as adults – mining and agricultural accidents were all too common – and that the state’s official assistance to the blind was limited to children and youth, Albert and Sara began to travel throughout the Church in the western regions, learning what was needed and working with individual blind adults in their homes to teach them to read Braille and to learn some sort of manual work to support themselves. Manual work was important to Albert, for what it could do to lift the spirits of the blind.

There is probably no other class of people who feel as keenly as do the blind the necessity of that great decree which was pronounced upon our first parents on earth. “Thou shalt earn thy bread by the sweat of thy brow.”

People are to a great extent in the habit of looking upon this as being a curse placed upon man, while in reality it is the greatest blessing ever given to him. If it were not for this condition the human race would be very little in advance of the lower animals.

The Lord knew how necessary it was for the development of man that he be kept employed in working for the necessities of life, for it was said in connection with the commandment, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee,” making it necessary that man should labor in order to obtain a living.

But many of the blind are deprived of this great blessing, since they are obliged to depend upon someone else to earn their daily bread. All people should be occupied, both the seeing and the blind. There is work for all to do, if one can only find what it is, and with it there are pleasures which can be found in no other way.

Albert encouraged weaving, the making of baskets, and the netting of hammocks as ways for the blind to be productive. He encouraged both the blind and their sighted friends to be patient – no one could expect success on the first try – and to try again and again, as often as it took, to learn to read and to learn some manual task to achieve at least partial self-support.

The couple’s travels to meet individually with the blind provided another necessity for Albert to demonstrate his mechanical genius. His chickens had to be fed, regardless of whether there was anyone home to feed them. He tinkered and adapted until he had invented a device involving a feed sack filled with corn, and an alarm clock. When the clock reached a pre-set feeding time, the alarm would ring to summon the chickens, who soon learned their signal and came running from all parts of the yard, and the device would scatter a set amount of corn on the ground.

Because the Talmages lived in Provo, location of the State Hospital, they also taught crafts to patients there. Much to the consternation of neighborhood children who mistakenly believed that all mentally ill people were dangerous, a patient from the hospital would call for the Talmages in the morning, drive them to the hospital in a horse-drawn surrey, and return them to their home in the afternoon.

But of all the work he did, none was more important to Albert, nor as long lasting, as his work on The Messenger to the Sightless. Through the efforts of his brother James, The Messenger was offered to mission presidents for use with the blind in their areas. The magazine reached as far as Aleppo, Turkey, where Joseph Wilford Booth (James E. Talmage’s wife was a sister to Booth), shared it with a school for the blind there. In 1927, near the end of James’s term as European Mission President, he visited the Turkish Mission, and Booth took him to Aleppo’s school for the blind. When the students there heard the name “Talmage,” they stood in respect to the man who was doing so much to assist the blind.

Sara died in 1932, and Albert continued publication of The Messenger until 1953. He died in 1955.