Eight miles outside Rockhill, N.C., there's a small, family-owned dairy farm. And on this farm there lived some cows.
And on this farm, there lived a very bright 6-year-old student at Winthrop Training School who would trade in his milk pail for a chance to revolutionize the way handicapped people interact with the world.
Sixty years later, Engineering Prof. Thomas H. Hutchinson, better known to his students as "Hutch," has come a long way from his family's farm.
Today, the 66-year-old Calcott Professor of Biochemical Engineering flies search missions as a pilot with the Civil Air Patrol, offers medical consulting services, teaches at Cambridge every three years and keeps office hours until 1:00 in the morning.
"I only sleep five hours a night," Hutch said. "That helps."
But perhaps the most defining role of Hutch's career thus far has been his involvement with ERICA, Inc., the company he began with Stephen Hawking to give handicapped people access to the information superhighway.
ERICA, which stands for Eyegaze Response Interface Computer Aid, is a device that allows severely paralyzed individuals to control a cursor with their eyes. Once ERICA studies the eye image and determines where on the screen the user is looking, all the user has to do is blink to click.
"Typing with your eyes sounds like something a wizard would allow you to do," Hutch said. "Some people think I'm Merlin or something."
The concept for the ERICA machine, which he describes as "embarrassingly simple," came as a result of a high school football accident that left Hutch completely paralyzed for 12 days of his junior year.
"I was comatose and came out of paralysis over a period of 60 days, from being able to move my eyes to finally being able to walk again," he explained. "I realized that the first thing that started moving was my eyes, and the nurse saw that I was finally awake and looking at her.
"So when I started to think about communication, I thought that the eyes were the most robust, resilient part of the body. The trauma of paralysis gave me the drive to help people who were fully paralyzed and unable to speak," he added.
But the handicapped aren't the only ones who can take advantage of ERICA's capabilities: companies such as Microsoft purchase the equipment to enhance their computer interfaces.
Because ERICA's commercial applications led to a perceived conflict of interest between a device that benefits the public and a business run solely for profit, ERICA eventually had to leave her home on Grounds.
"We bought our patents from the University and created ERICA, Inc. in order to raise money from private companies that could support our more humanitarian efforts," Hutch said. "The money we make from psychological and consumer testing allows us to provide paralyzed people with an ERICA device at a reasonable cost."
The original machine sold in 1989 for a whopping $40,000, but can now be sold to the handicapped for $8,000 as a result of commercial profits.
"The price is getting closer to where we want it to be, and is now about the price of a good wheelchair," he said. "But this opens your world, it allows you to communicate."
So what brought a would-be dairy farmer into a college lecture hall and then into the boardroom?
"I realized that working exceedingly hard on a dairy farm is not a great deal of fun because it combines hard physical labor with economic poverty," Hutch explained. "It was a huge incentive for me not to work on a farm."
In fact, when Bryant Gumble interviewed Hutch's father on the "Today Show," he heard the same story.
When asked what makes Prof. Hutchinson so successful, his father answered, "He's terrified of going back to the dairy farm."
Yet, as they say, you can take a boy out of the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy.
"My experience on the farm gave me a unique perspective that is hard to duplicate and is enormously beneficial," Hutch said. "I'll never forget it."
He has also come a long way from the Winthrop School. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from Clemson, went to medical school at the University of Minnesota and earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University.
But instead of covering his office walls with the degrees, Hutch has a simple map of the island of Barbados, where he hopes to retire one day.
But that day is a long way off.
"I'll be there when it feels right," Hutch said while pointing at the map. "But I don't know that I'll ever be comfortable leaving the University of Virginia."
Especially when there's still work to be done.
"There are still so many people out there that I want to reach -- people with Lou Gehrig's disease, children with cerebral palsy, the elderly with strokes," Hutch said. "Over 200,000 people could use ERICA today to communicate but only if it's cheap enough."
In order to raise discretionary funds to help these potential users, Hutch sells both the hardware and the analysis software, of which he is the only provider. Once a company such as Microsoft pays $70,000 for the package, ERICA, Inc. can turn around and sell it to a paralyzed child for a price as low as $1.
One such child, a little girl in Oklahoma, has systems both at home and at school so her mother does not have to cart the system back and forth.
The future of ERICA looks as bright as the mischievous twinkle in Hutch's eyes. He sees a possibility for ERICA in the high-security sector, which would use the machine to perform eye-scans of individuals seeking security clearance.
This idea, presented as science-fiction in Tom Cruise's blockbuster, "Minority Report," possibly could replace the fingerprint as a means of identification in security defense systems.
"The Tom Cruise movie is a likely reality at some point," Hutch said. "Even though it's not up to me to tell them exactly how to do it, you can't put the genie back in the bottle."
In the meantime, Hutch will continue to fly his airplane, help the handicapped and teach his beloved systems engineers.
"I love students, I'm totally devoted to students," Hutch said. "In fact, I'm not planning to take leave next semester so I can teach things I need to teach."
His escape to Barbados postponed another year, he will keep entertaining his audiences.
"Teaching takes a talent, just like an actor," he explained. "Part of it is acting -- relating to your audience. Your lectures are in your head, they're not on those PowerPoint slides."
Even on a regimen of five hours of sleep and a few hours on the squash court for exercise, Hutch manages to tackle the world's problems, one blink at a time.
He credits his strong focus -- which he says he keeps on the good of humanity as a whole rather than just on himself.
"I'm just kind of who I am," Hutch said, "I perceive that you only get one shot at this life, and I'm going after it myself."
After all, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
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