Most of us stare at our smartphone screens these days. Fifty years ago, Northop developed a system designed to help pilots in danger of “screen fixation.” (iStock)

Sometimes when I’m ambling down the street, I try to see how long I can walk toward another person before they notice me. Since most pedestrians have their eyes glued to their phones these days, I usually end up having to weave away, lest we collide.

Experts call this behavior “screen fixation” or “target fixation.” It’s fairly harmless on a sidewalk but can be dangerous when the screen is attached to something that’s really big or really fast.

Or that’s floating. My father’s a sailor and once had me take the helm of his little tugboat-style Ranger as we putt-putted in a canal off the Intracoastal Waterway. Dad had just shown me some of the boat’s bells and whistles, including the high-tech GPS-linked instrument panel, which could display all sorts of detailed information.

Coolest of all was the overlay that showed the boat as a little dot moving on the colorful chart, complete with water depth, shoreline, buoys and other obstructions. Watching the little dot respond to each turn of the wheel was mesmerizing. Magellan would have loved this, I thought.

Then I looked up and saw to my horror that there was a boat tied up at a dock off my starboard bow. I’d been so focused on the screen — the screen that didn’t show the other boat — that I hadn’t seen that I was on a collision course. And that, my friends, is screen fixation.

Our smartphone fixation will no doubt lead to woe. Obviously, texting-and-driving is bad. And when we prefer gazing at the pixels on our phones to the glories of the world around us — the nodding buttercups, the chirruping songbirds — we’re one step closer to “The Matrix.”

As I pondered screen fixation — and by “pondered” I mean “Googled” — I stumbled onto one of the earliest uses of the term and of efforts to combat the problem.

In 1955, a test pilot named Ray Tenhoff was at the controls of a Northrop F-89 all-weather interceptor. While testing the plane’s radar he became so focused on the screen that he didn’t realize he wasn’t in level flight but was headed straight for the ground. Tenhoff pulled the jet out of its dive, landed and told the Northrop engineers there had to be a better way to warn pilots of dangerous situations. Buzzers and lights were only so good. Why not a human voice?

And thus was born the Voice Interruption Priority System, or VIPS, arguably the progenitor of all the recorded voices that talk at us now, from the “Step back, doors closing” woman on the Metro to the dashboard GPS hectoring you to make a U-turn.

In a box that weighed eight pounds, Northrop packed a unit that included a one-inch-wide magnetic tape on which were recorded 20 messages covering 50 faults. Sensors in the plane triggered such audible warnings as “Check for engine fire,” “Canopy unlocked” and “Hydraulic system failure.”

The warnings were delivered in a cool, clear voice. A woman’s voice. Gina Drazin’s voice.

“This was really a surprise for me,” said Gina on the phone after I’d tracked her down in California. “I was very satisfied to join it and do whatever [Northrop] wanted me to do.”

Gina, now 89, was a secretary at the defense contractor. She was selected from a dozen women and six men who auditioned.

“She doesn’t glorify all of this,” her husband, Louis, 90, told me. “She downplays her participation, even though she was very involved ... I think it was the first voice-activated system anywhere.”

Northrop’s engineers thought a woman’s voice would stand out more amid the complications of a cockpit.

“In that period, we did not have women in commercial air transport, did not have women flight crews,” said Louis, who also worked at Northrop. “Nor did we have female crews in bombers, nor did we have female fighter pilots at that time.”

There weren’t any female air traffic controllers, either. If a female voice came over the intercom, something was up. (Tenhoff did not live to see the system deployed in 1962. The test pilot died in 1960 in the crash of a B-58 Hustler bomber.)

A 1962 Popular Science magazine story about the development of the system described Gina’s voice as flat, clean, and carefully drained of all charm and emotion. That made it stand out among all the voices that were tested.

“One girl lost out because she couldn’t avoid sounding sultry,” wrote Popular Science. “The Air Force didn’t want pilots to think of anything but malfunctions.”

The next time a disembodied voice talks to you, think of Gina. Oh, and stop staring at your screen, would YA?

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.