My family got on the boat hearing. We’ve been Deaf ever since.
1891 is the year my family crossed the Atlantic for the steel mills of Pittsburgh — and the year, somewhere out on the water, we became a Deaf family instead of a hearing one. We have been ever since. The studio is named for that year because that year is the whole point.
A hearing family got on a ship. A Deaf family got off.
My great-great-grandfather, Robert Davies, was an ironworker in the north of England. In 1891 he sailed from Liverpool on the SS Wisconsin, bound across the Atlantic for New York. His destination was a single word on the manifest: Pittsburgh. The mills were hiring, and they were hiring men who weren’t afraid of heat and moving metal.
Later that summer his wife, Jane, made the same crossing with their two small boys. She was twenty-one and seven months pregnant. Somewhere on the water one of the boys, George, fell ill — bad water, or something passing through steerage; the records don’t say. He mostly recovered. But his hearing never fully came back. Two months after they landed, Jane gave birth to a daughter, Gertrude. Gertrude was Deaf from the start.
They left England a hearing family. Within months of reaching Pennsylvania, they were raising two Deaf children. They were never Deaf in England. They were never hearing in America. The ocean is the line our whole story gets told across.
I don’t tell it as a loss, because it never was one. Robert spent forty-four years in the mills. Gertrude grew up, went to school in a language built for her, and gave her life to building rooms where the rest of us could do the same. The crossing didn’t take something from my family. It handed us the thing we’ve been building with ever since.
Every generation since has built the same thing.
- 1891The crossing. The family becomes Deaf.
- 1900Gertrude enters the school for the Deaf.
- 1940She founds a club — its first president.
- 2018My daughter is born — the fifth.
- TodayThe studio, in Frederick.
Gertrude enrolled at the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in 1900 — the same school her brother went to, the same one my grandmother would go to, the same one our family kept circling back to for the better part of a century. She married another student there, Merrill Wilson. In 1940 the two of them helped found the Monongahela Valley Silent Club, and Gertrude was elected its first president.
I think about that club a lot. A room of Deaf adults — after a full shift in the mills and the print shops — electing officers and keeping minutes by hand: motion, second, vote, result, signed at the bottom. Nobody handed them a place to gather and be understood. They built one. That minute book stayed in the family.
The line runs from Gertrude straight to my desk. She was the first — born Deaf in 1891. Then my grandmother, Betty. My father, Gary, who gave his whole career to Deaf education. Me, the fourth. And my daughter, born in 2018 — the fifth. A five-generation Deaf family, and every one of us, in our own century, did some version of the same job: make a room where everyone in it can follow every word, without anyone having to shrink themselves to fit.
I’m Anthony. I build the whole thing myself, out of Frederick.
I’m the fourth generation. I went to Gallaudet, spent a good chunk of my life making films and doing strategy for Deaf organizations, and somewhere in there I figured out I’d rather build the tools than keep writing about why they were missing.
So that’s what the studio is. The same hand that solders a board writes the firmware, draws the icons, hand-codes the page you’re reading, and pushes it live. There’s no marketing department standing between me and you. When I say a product solves a problem we live, I mean it literally — my family has been quietly working around that exact problem for a hundred and thirty-five years, and I finally have the tools to fix it instead of route around it.
The interfaces I design aren’t speculative. They’re the ones we’ve been improvising at kitchen tables and in loud restaurants my whole life. I’m just writing them down in software now.
— Anthony Mowl, founderA hundred and thirty-five years of practice, made into software.
The patterns I design with weren’t invented in a lab. They were invented in residential-school hallways and Silent Club meetings and the corner of a loud restaurant where my family worked out how to flag the waiter. There are fifteen products today, and they all run on the same handful of rules:
Captions are on by default, never buried in a settings menu. Audio is additive, never the only channel — every state change carries color and icon and text, so the thing still works with the speakers muted. Your records stay yours; leave whenever you want and take everything with you. Plain language over jargon. And the room you’re actually standing in always matters more than the app in your pocket.
Mostly, they’re all the same product wearing different clothes — a way for people to gather and understand each other, in the room they’re really in:
Designed For Us, Built For Everyone. It isn’t a slogan. It’s a description of who’s in the room when the work gets made.
That’s the throughline. Everything here is a current draft of the same project my great-grandmother was working on in 1940 — the gathering, brought forward.
The crossing was the beginning, not the end. We’re still building.
See what the studio makes →