I Can Hear You Whisper Read online

  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 speechreader, 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.

  • • •

  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.”

  • • •

  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.

  To Deaf historians, Bell committed some unforgivable sins. Worse than his push for oralism were his views on genetics, a hot topic in late-nineteenth-century scientific circles. At the lodge he and Mabel built as a second home in Nova Scotia, he conducted years of sheep breeding experiments. When he turned his interest in heredity to the deaf, he launched extensive studies of deaf ancestry in places with higher than normal incidence of deafness, like Martha’s Vineyard. (At the time, roughly half of the cases of hearing loss in the United States were due to infectious disease.) In 1883, Bell published a paper warning of the risk that deaf intermarriage would result in deaf children. He urged the deaf to socialize with and marry hearing people and even raised the possibility of a law forbidding marriage among the deaf, though he ended by dismissing the idea as unworkable. Even in the context of the age, the paper was deeply offensive to deaf people. There was a storm of attention that sullied Bell’s reputation.

  Hero to some, villain
to others, Bell may have been neither, according to deaf education expert Marc Marschark, who maintains, “He was not as clearly definite in his beliefs about language as is often supposed.” Bell’s writings hint at the complexities that still reverberate. Bell believed the deaf should strive to join the hearing majority, but he also defended “the de l’Epée language” as “a complete language.” He noted that while he preferred an oral approach for the “semi-deaf” or “semi-mute” (i.e., hard of hearing), for the rest he “was not so sure.” And Bell regularly set a trap for people by way of demonstrating just how hard speechreading could be.

  “It rate ferry aren’t hadn’t four that reason high knit donned co,” Bell would say.

  “It rained very hard and for that reason I did not go,” a lipreader would say, diligently repeating what he thought Bell had said.

  To the argument that sign language was easier, Bell countered that just because Italian is easier than English doesn’t mean Americans should abandon their native tongue.

  Until the late twentieth century and the advent of cochlear implants, the most decisive moment in the battle between speech and sign came in 1880 at an international conference of deaf educators in Milan. The conference passed a resolution declaring the “incontestable superiority of speech over signs” and that the simultaneous use of sign “injured” the development of speech and should be prohibited. In short order, many deaf schools around the world switched from teaching sign to “pure oralism” (left to themselves, the students communicated through sign). Between 1900 and 1920, the number of deaf students in America being educated in the oral method went from 40 to 80 percent. Signing was forbidden.

  • • •

  History is never black and white; it is tinted by those who tell it.

  According to Harlan Lane, who is hearing and an ardent advocate of Deaf culture, “oralist tradition is a story of greed, plagiarism, secrecy, trickery—but not education. Its aim is speech.” Lane’s virulence and absolutism put me off, but through him I glimpsed some uncomfortable truths and saw deaf history as many in Deaf culture view it. (Lane has admitted, however, that relatively few deaf people are able to read his books.)

  By contrast, David Wright, who learned to talk before he went deaf at seven from meningitis, was a product of a successful oral education, and he ends by making a case against the isolation of deaf schools—at least in his time, the 1930s and 1940s. “The weather of the two worlds, of the deaf and the hearing, is different: in passing from one to the other you have to become acclimatized,” he wrote. “From the day I entered the deaf school, I had begun to live a schizoid life, to develop two simultaneous personalities.” Wright admits that not everyone would be able to make the choice for the hearing world as he did. “It is almost impossible to exaggerate the narrow scope of the general information of a deaf-born boy whose vocabulary may sometimes be too scanty to allow him to browse over a popular newspaper,” he said in describing a class at his deaf school. “If knowledge can be compared to light, most hearing people live in a twilight precinct with one or two brightly lit patches—subjects with which they have special acquaintance. But my companions, it seemed to me, existed in a pitch-blackness shot through with a few concentrated beams of painfully gathered information.” Even for Wright, oral education was a steep climb. When he graduated from Oxford in 1942, not more than a half dozen or so other deaf students had graduated from any English university. That fact, he acknowledged, was “a commentary on the recentness and difficulty of the higher education of the deaf.”

  Seventy years later, the problem can no longer be called recent, but it is still stubbornly difficult.

  6

  “MARVELOUS MECHANISM”

  Into the twentieth century, doctors tried a variety of measures, including the cruel and the crackpot, to repair damaged ears. A French physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, used leeches, pierced eardrums, catheterized the ear, and fractured the skull by striking just behind the ear with a hammer. And Itard was working for Epée. “Medicine does not work on the dead,” he concluded, “and as far as I am concerned the ear is dead in the deaf-mute. There is nothing for science to do about it.” You can almost hear the harrumph of a man who has been defeated by a problem beyond his abilities. You can also hear the sound of a deaf person’s skull cracking. Nineteenth-century doctors, if you can call them that, were operating in the dark. They knew very little about how hearing really worked. The aid they offered was limited to ear trumpets, which, like an expanded version of a cupped hand behind the ear, could be aimed at the source of sound to amplify it ever so slightly.

  People knew very little about sound as well. The ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras conducted experiments with vibrating strings in 500 BC, and Leonardo da Vinci was the first to recognize that sound traveled in waves. But grasping what happened when those waves washed over the ear, how they traveled to the brain and were understood as speech or music or noise, was a problem of another order.

  German physician Hermann von Helmholtz was a man of many interests, including physiology, mathematics, thermodynamics, optics, and acoustics. His invention of the ophthalmoscope made it possible to study the interior of the eye, and he advanced the understanding of the perception of color. His 1863 book, the very one that captivated Alexander Graham Bell, has been described as “monumental” and is still used in psychoacoustics, the study of human perception of sound. Helmholtz invented a resonator, a device to intensify and enrich sound by adding vibration, and used it to identify the frequencies of complex sounds. His resonance—or harp—theory described what might happen in the ear when sensing a sound. He captured some of the basics correctly: that air passing through the outer ear set first the middle ear bones and then the fluid of the inner ear in motion. He also theorized that parts of the basilar membrane vibrated “sympathetically” with specific tones and less strongly for other tones, and sent related messages to the nerves.

  The capacity to confirm that Helmholtz was onto something and to measure what was really happening in the ear had to wait for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. It’s true that the advent of the telephone made it much more difficult for anyone who didn’t hear well to participate in the larger society. For the deaf and hard of hearing, there was irony in the romantic vision many held of the telephone: “With one broad sweep the barriers of time and space are gone and all the world becomes our vocal neighborhood,” wrote Harold Arnold, the director of research at Bell Laboratories in the early part of the twentieth century. Yet the effort to perfect the telephone and extend its reach had some unexpected benefits. Western Electric’s engineering department was reorganized and rechristened Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925. Later consolidated with AT&T’s engineering department, it would become synonymous with scientific innovation. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Bell Labs building on West Street near the Hudson River in lower Manhattan drew some of the brightest scientific minds in the country and paid them to develop one breakthrough after another, including the vacuum tube, the transistor, and the concept of information theory. Those scientists also, for several decades, knew more than almost anyone else in the world about sound, speech, and hearing.

  That research was led by a man named Harvey Fletcher. A Utah native who joined Bell Labs during World War I, Fletcher had done his doctoral work in physics at the University of Chicago with Robert Millikan and taken part in the famous “oil-drop experiment” to establish the charge of all electrons in the universe. At Bell, working for Harold Arnold, whom he had known at Chicago, Fletcher “got into acoustics” as he put it in a 1963 interview. Others warned him that “all there was to know about acoustics had already been discovered,” but he proved just how little those scientists knew about how much they didn’t know. Fletcher set out to “accurately describe every part of the system from the voice through the telephone instruments to and including the ear,” he wrote.

  Reading his landmark 1929 book, Speech and Hearing, I was surprised by how many
of its observations still spoke to my own experience and search for knowledge. I was reminded how much I had taken hearing for granted. “The atmosphere of sounds in which we live ministers so constantly to our knowledge and enjoyment of our surroundings that through long familiarity we have come to feel, if not contempt, at least indifference toward the marvelous mechanism through which it works,” wrote Harold Arnold in the introduction to Speech and Hearing. “Hearing, we are inclined to consider as little a matter for concern as breathing; and so long as our own faculty remains unimpaired we feel little curiosity concerning the provisions of nature either for ourselves or for others.” In a later edition, Fletcher wrote: “The processes of speaking and hearing are very intimately related, so much so that I have often said that we speak with our ears. We can listen without speaking but cannot speak without listening.”

  Fletcher and Arnold’s research team approached the problem methodically. “The attack was first launched most vigorously on the constitution of speech,” wrote Fletcher. If they could establish a reasonable description of average speech, he thought, they could find out what small imperfections and variations affected intelligibility. Their primary weapon was a machine that could better capture what speech actually looked like by creating pictures of waveforms that would be “readily interpreted by the eye.” The “high-quality oscillograph” they invented used a telephone transmitter to convert speech waves to electrical waves, which were then magnified with an amplifier and sent into an oscillograph, where they caused a tiny ribbon to vibrate. That motion was photographed on a moving film. Fletcher notes almost offhandedly that in order to create “the perfection of this instrument,” they first had to invent three other critical devices: a condenser transmitter that could be calibrated, a vacuum tube to produce the amplification and electrical oscillations, and the basic oscillograph itself.