I Can Hear You Whisper (7 page)

Learning to communicate through sign was faster and easier than learning to speak. It was, therefore, more widely accessible, putting education within reach of all deaf people, no matter their level of hearing or family circumstances. Epée believed in the importance of helping the deaf as a class rather than working with a few high achievers. By formalizing sign language and putting it in the classroom, he didn't just create a new form of deaf education, he also sparked centuries of questions about the signs themselves. Could they really be considered a language? Were they inferior to spoken language? (Epée himself thought they were.) What were the limitations, if any, to signing? Jean Massieu's vigorous mind notwithstanding, most hearing people—and plenty of deaf people, too—considered sign language primitive, concrete, and pictorial. Those fallacies wouldn't disappear until the 1960s and 1970s, when linguists began studying the language formally. In the eighteenth century as in the twenty-first, there was also the problem of numbers. Was sign language worth pursuing if it meant one could only communicate with other signers? By definition, it seemed, the deaf would be limiting themselves to conversing with one another.

Learning to speak was a more difficult process, sometimes even impossible for those who had been born profoundly deaf. To learn to speak, you must not just hear those around you, you also need to hear yourself. Imagine trying to learn Japanese through a soundproof window, suggests one audiologist. Those in the signing camp were always suspicious of oral successes, wanting to know when and how they lost their hearing and whether any remained. Manualists also argued that the sheer effort involved in learning to talk crowded out educational content. On the other hand, some, especially those with usable residual hearing, were quite capable of speaking. If they could also read lips, properly referred to as speechreading and a skill that is not easily mastered, they could sometimes manage surprisingly well. An oral education could provide access to the hearing world, pushing deaf people not inward but outward.

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When a young American carried Epée's sign language to the United States in 1816, the argument over its merits caught a ride on the same ship. A few years earlier, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet had visited his family's Connecticut home during a brief vacation from his studies at Andover Theological Seminary. Studious, modest, a little frail, and deeply religious, Gallaudet stood in the garden under an elm tree one afternoon and watched his youngest brothers playing a game of fox and hounds with the children of Mason Fitch Cogswell, a prominent local physician who lived next door.
Gallaudet paid particular attention to eight-year-old Alice Cogswell, who had lost her hearing completely after contracting “spotted fever” (cerebrospinal meningitis) as a toddler. Despite the Cogswells' best efforts, Alice was not thriving. She had lost what language she'd had, and her family knew that she understood little of what went on around her.

Gallaudet's concern for Alice was “immediate and deep,” one of Alice's relatives later wrote. “He at once attempted to converse with and instruct her.” Taking the hat off his head, he placed it on the ground and wrote the letters
H-A-T
in the dirt. Then he pointed from the object to the word repeatedly. When she seemed to understand, he erased the letters and wrote them again farther down the garden. Alice picked up the hat and placed it by the new letters. Gallaudet was thrilled with his success and it marked the beginning, wrote Harlan Lane, of a “consuming interest in deafness.” After finishing seminary, Gallaudet spent much of the following year working with Alice.

Though schools for the deaf—both silent and oral—had been springing up across Europe, deaf education in America was nonexistent. A few wealthy families sent their deaf children to Europe, but that option wasn't open to many. Nor was it always desirable. Preferring to keep Alice at home, Mason Cogswell gathered a group of Hartford businessmen to discuss establishing a deaf school. The men resolved to send someone to study European methods and didn't have to look far to find the man for the job. Thomas Gallaudet still lived next door.

Gallaudet set off for Britain in the summer of 1815 intending to combine the best of the oral and manual systems. In London and Edinburgh, he sought out the leading deaf educators, the Braidwood family and their protégés, but they continually put him off and finally suggested an apprenticeship with unacceptably severe restrictions. Meanwhile, the Abbé Sicard arrived in Britain with Massieu and another of his most successful students-turned-teachers, Laurent Clerc. Gallaudet attended one of their fund-raising demonstrations, and Sicard invited him to Paris.

Frustrated by his lack of progress in Britain, Gallaudet eventually took Sicard up on his offer. For a puritanical New Englander, Paris was somewhat horrifying. Gallaudet found the French frivolous and lacking in religious fervor. (“
Oh! how this poor heathen people want the Bible and the Sabbath!” he wrote to Mason Cogswell.) But at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, he was welcomed with open arms. Massieu and Clerc taught him sign language. He observed any class he wanted. By the summer, Gallaudet had been converted to the idea of using sign language to educate the deaf. He asked Laurent Clerc to return with him to Connecticut.

The American Asylum, the first school for the deaf in America, opened in Hartford in 1817 with Gallaudet as principal and Clerc as head teacher. Like Epée's Institute, the Asylum, which today is called the American School for the Deaf, was a residential school. Clerc and Gallaudet sowed the seeds of American Sign Language by blending Epée's sign language with the many signs already being used by the American deaf. Other schools modeling the Hartford approach soon opened elsewhere. By 1868, there were twenty-seven in the United States, and the number continued to grow. As the name Asylum implies, the schools were designed with the Victorian ethos of public charity in mind. Children lived there from very young ages, and were cared for, but were also kept away from the general public.

Gallaudet's son,
Edward Miner Gallaudet, later became the first superintendent of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, which opened as a school in 1857 in Washington, DC, on the property of a businessman named Amos Kendall. By 1864, Edward Gallaudet and his supporters prevailed upon Congress to authorize funding for the first National Deaf-Mute College. The Columbia Institution thus became the first center of higher education for the deaf. Today, it is Gallaudet University, still located in the same spot in northeast Washington. It remains the only higher education institution for the deaf in the world that has the right to confer degrees.

Not every school followed the Asylum's lead, however. As in Europe, there was a group in America who preferred that deaf children be taught to speak and read lips. Chief among them was Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a patent lawyer from Boston who, like Mason Cogswell, had a deaf daughter.
Mabel Hubbard contracted scarlet fever at the age of five. Mamma, why don't you talk to me? Mabel remembered thinking when the illness finally passed. Firmly believing his daughter could speak and learn just like other children, Hubbard hired a teacher to work on her speech and language.

Like Cogswell before him, Hubbard rounded up leading citizens for support, including philanthropist John Clarke, who provided
a grant of $50,000 (about $750,000 today). They lobbied the Massachusetts legislature for funding and Mabel, aged nine and an excellent speech-reader, testified at the hearings as an example of what was achievable. Clarke School received its charter from the state in 1867 and opened in the town of Northampton as the nation's first oral deaf school. It is still there, along with satellite schools in four other locations on the East Coast.

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The foundations of deaf education in America were solid, but one significant figure had yet to arrive whose views and technological imaginings would shift the course of history and have inconceivable ramifications for the deaf.

Born in Scotland in 1847,
Alexander Graham Bell grew up in a household focused on sound and its absence. His grandfather and father were both “elocutionists”; today they would be called speech pathologists. His mother, Eliza, was deaf. Of the three boys, Alec, as he was called (he originally spelled it Aleck but dropped the “k” in America), was the most attuned to his mother and communicated with her by putting his mouth close to her forehead and speaking in a deep voice. Around the dinner table, Alec used the manual alphabet to fingerspell for Eliza and keep her abreast of the conversation. His own ear was said to be “unusually discriminating.” At night, lying in bed, he could identify each Edinburgh church bell as it tolled and knew which neighbor's dog was barking.

Melville Bell, Alec's father, spent years creating a phonetic system called
Visible Speech, a complex series of symbols depicting each possible human speech sound. It was designed to allow anyone to produce a sound whether they heard it or understood it. His sons regularly demonstrated. In one instance in 1864, the young Bell brothers waited down the hall while Melville wrote out a symbolic version of an obscure sound from Sanskrit along with words from Persian, Hindi, and Urdu dictated by the speech experts in the audience. The boys wowed the crowd by re-creating the sounds exactly. Visible Speech's possibilities for teaching the deaf led both Melville and Alec to begin working with deaf students in the 1860s. Ultimately, though, the system proved too cumbersome and complicated to be workable.

Alexander Graham Bell wasn't as enamored of Visible Speech as his father, yet after he settled in Boston in 1871, he came to see the education of the deaf as his true calling. Although Bell was naturally drawn toward teaching the deaf to speak, his work with one of his students, a boy named
George Sanders, was reminiscent of Gallaudet's early lessons with Alice Cogswell. Bell labeled every toy in the boy's room and wrote the name of each object on a card. “George would appear and make his sign for doll,” wrote Bell. “He folded his arms and beat his shoulders rapidly with his hands. The doll would be produced and his attention directed to the word ‘doll' posted on its forehead. We then compared this word with words written on cards to see who could first find the card with the word ‘doll' upon it.” Eventually, Bell pretended not to know which toy George wanted until the boy used the proper card to ask for it.

Bell had another passion as well. After spending his days teaching deaf students, he occupied his nights experimenting with ways of using electricity to transmit the human voice. He was an amateur scientist, untrained in the physics of sound and ignorant of the principles of electricity, but nevertheless fascinated and feverishly obsessed with the possibilities. Early on, he used tuning forks to explore the elements of vowel sounds and devised his own instruments to measure the volumes of air in speech. On the ship to North America, he had passed the time poring over Hermann von
Helmholtz's 1863 book,
On the Sensations of Tone
, an influential examination of the physics of perception.
Bell became convinced that undulating current could mimic the subtle changes in intensity, amplitude, and frequency that make up speech. In 1876, he proved it at his workshop when his assistant, John Watson, famously heard him say over the wire they had rigged between rooms: “
Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” The telephone Bell designed had a microphone in the mouthpiece that vibrated when you spoke into it and caused a magnet inside a coil of wire to vibrate, too, which generated an electrical current down the wire. The process was essentially reversed at the other end, where the electricity was converted back into sound.

According to his biographer Robert Bruce, Bell was a paradox. “
He came to his miracle of sound transmission in working to help those who would be totally unable to avail themselves of it.” But there is common ground. “For all the seeming disparity of his interests,” wrote Bruce, “there was a basic unity in their tendency: that of furthering communication and human togetherness.”

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In 1872, at Edward Gallaudet's invitation, Bell visited the American Asylum. While
at Hartford, Bell learned some sign language and wrote that he saw its potential as a teaching tool, but his emphasis remained on speech because he believed that allowing the deaf to be part of the wider world was paramount.

His wife shared that view. Mabel Hubbard, daughter of Gardiner Greene Hubbard, began studying speech with Bell in 1873, when she was still a teenager, and married him soon after. She spoke well enough to “pass” in some instances as hearing. “
Only the intensity with which she watched her companion's mouth and her distorted vowels when she herself spoke gave her away,” wrote Charlotte Gray, whose biography of Bell,
Reluctant Genius
, devotes considerable attention to Mabel. “For Alec, she was living proof that if a deaf person was completely integrated into speaking society, she need not be regarded as ‘abnormal.'”

With a deaf mother and a deaf wife, Bell knew what it was to experience the world without hearing. Ironically, these women in his life had a fairly low opinion of the deaf.
His mother initially objected to his marriage to Mabel out of worry for their children (she didn't know then that Mabel had lost her hearing to illness). Bell was deeply offended and didn't communicate with his mother for months. For her part, Mabel actively encouraged her husband to give up his work with the deaf, though he refused. “
When I was young,” Mabel wrote, “and struggling for a foot-hold in the society of my natural equals, I could not be nice to other deaf people. It was a case of self-preservation.”

After his invention of the telephone brought money and fame, Bell used his position as a platform and became America's most visible supporter of oral deaf education, founding a research organization on deaf education called the Volta Bureau, which lives on in Washington today as part of the AG Bell Association.