The Invention of Miracles

Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness

Katie Booth

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501167102
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Biographien der Naturwissenschaften & Technik

Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize "Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail" (Steve Silberman), this "provocative, sensitive, beautifully written biography" (Sylvia Nasar) tells the true—and troubling—story of Alexander Graham Bell's quest to end deafness. "Researched and written through the Deaf perspective, this marvelously engaging history will have us rethinking the invention of the telephone." —Jaipreet Virdi, PhD, author of Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that's not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. The Invention of Miracles takes a "stirring" ( The New York Times Book Review ), "provocative" ( The Boston Globe ), "scrupulously researched" ( Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ) new look at an American icon, revealing the astonishing true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more disturbing legacy of Bell's: his efforts to suppress American Sign Language. Weaving together a dazzling tale of innovation with a moving love story, the book offers a heartbreaking account of how a champion can become an adversary and an enthralling depiction of the deaf community's fight to reclaim a once-forbidden language.Katie Booth has been researching this story for more than fifteen years, poring over Bell's papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she's also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell's legacy on her family would set her on a path that overturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone.

PART I

Chapter 1

Mere voice is common to the brutes as man;

Articulation marks the nobler race…

—Alexander Bell, grandfather of Alexander Graham Bell

In 1863, at age sixteen, Alexander Graham Bell first started work on his speaking machine. He planned to give the contraption a human form, and then to play this mechanical body like an organ, with keys that depressed the different portions of the tongue and lips, and a wind chest to exhale the full words they formed. Aleck imagined that his machine would have a human skull, eyes and a nose, and a wig for hair. But first he had to build its working parts, its insides. He acquired a human skull from the local apothecary and used it to create molds for the jaw, teeth, nasal cavity, and the roof of the mouth, and he got to work, trying to coax them to speak.

In general this was a strange way for a teenager to spend his time, but in the Bell house Aleck fit right in. His father, Alexander Melville, known to his family simply as “Melville,” was an elocutionist who was designing a universal phonetic alphabet, one that would be able to document any sound in any language. Melville spent much of his time poised in front of a mirror in his study, sounding a single syllable over and over again as he studied the shape of his mouth. He filled notebooks with drawings of tongue positions and assigned symbols to each sound, each tongue position and lip position, each style of breathing. Melville had grand dreams for this work, but first he had to perfect it.

Recently, Melville’s research had taken him from the Bells’ home in Edinburgh, Scotland, to London, with Aleck in tow. There, they visited an inventor named Charles Wheatstone. In Europe, Wheatstone was considered the father of the telegraph, which had entered the public imagination twenty years earlier. At Wheatstone’s home, Aleck encountered a machine that entranced him: a wooden box with a bellows at one end and a hole at each side. There was nothing humanlike about it; its appearance was not what Aleck himself would later aspire to, but it gripped him just the same. Wheatstone threaded both hands into the box and used his right elbow to press down on the bellows, giving the machine air. Whatever Wheatstone did inside the box, Aleck didn’t know; the mechanics were obscured by the box. Wheatstone operated the apparatus to utter a few sentences with its ducklike voice, and Aleck was delighted. As a parting gift, Wheatstone lent Melville the book by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen that included the designs he’d used to build the machine. When they got back to Scotland, Melville challenged Aleck to build his own version of the machine with the help of his older brother, Melly. He wanted them to become a part of the family business, and he saw an opportunity now to stoke their interest.

Now, Aleck hunched over these parts with a coiled focus. He had a part of himself that could be free and loose, laughing loudly, doodling strange drawings in his notebooks, striking poses for his father’s camera—but he tended to push this part of him aside. When he worked, he only worked. His body was a study of contradiction: black chin-length hair virtually untamable, always falling out of place; eyes full of dark intensity; posture in tight Victorian control; hands clumsier than he wished. Now he willed them to build this most delicate and powerful thing, the interior of the human mouth.

Aleck and Melly pored over the pages of the book, which included full plates detailing the workings of the human voice. Aleck learned that control of voice within the mouth begins at the back, with the tender, tissuey sponge before the roof begins: the soft palate. The soft palate has the elasticity to sink, to kiss the back of the tongue, to block air from the mouth entirely, producing nasal sounds alone, as in the beginning of the sound ng. The soft palate, too, needs to be able to rise for the free flow of air, a long A Ahhhh. He made the palate from rubber and attached iron wire to the top, allowing him to lift the soft palate up or let it rest. Aleck knew that this precise control of physical elements was where speech was made.

Through high school, Aleck had been closer to his brother Edward, who was just one year younger, but now that he was finished with school, his work on the speaking machine would unite him and Melly in a single mission. In certain ways, Melly, who was two years older, was the opposite of Aleck. Where Aleck’s default was seriousness, Melly’s was playfulness and optimism. The Bells had a camera three decades before personal cameras would even begin to become common, and while other families of the 1850s and ’60s stood stoically still for their portraits, the Bells donned strange costumes—plaid pants, Turkish hats, suits five sizes too big—and they played. Melly and his father were kings of exaggerated expressions: faces crushed in anguish, eyes comically wide in surprise. In one double-exposed image, Melly appears as a ghost, a sheet thrown over his body, while the rest of the family cowers playfully in horror.

By contrast, Aleck’s young face was characterized by the vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows, by a look like he’s squinting forever against the sunlight, lost in thought. In one photo, he has Melly’s jaw yanked open, and is peering seriously into his brother’s mouth, as if to see how it works.

In all things, Aleck learned through real experiences—both those that were successful and those that were traumatizing. On his best days, he learned from his failures, but normally he learned through pure enthusiasm. He always preferred open skies to classrooms, fumbling his way through his formal education. He loved to climb Corstorphine Hill behind his Edinburgh home, and wrote poetry about birds and weather, collected stones and plants and bones.

At the encouragement of his father, he had learned to classify plants by the Linnaean system, looking each plant up in a guidebook and identifying them with a long Latin name. Aleck had never received good marks in Latin, though; it was one of those subjects that drove him away from school. Monandria, diandria, triandria. He loved the world but hated Latin. It ruined botany. Instead, he turned to the body.

When his father gave him the corpse of a suckling pig, Aleck called for a special meeting of the “Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts Among Boys,” a small club he’d started. Aleck invited the members up into the attic of 13 South Charlotte Street, which was Aleck’s domain, where he collected his bones and plants and river rocks, where he laid them out in a system he supposed was scientific. The crowning piece of his collection was a human skull, another gift from his father, which kept his horrified mother at bay.

In the attic, Aleck set up boards for the young officers to sit on, and a table on which he laid the pig’s body. He, the “anatomy professor,” stood behind it prepared for his first lecture before his first audience, but when he brought the knife down into the abdomen, the body groaned a gassy exhale, loud enough to sound like a last gasp of life.

Aleck stood at the table, the knife in his hand, shocked. A moment later, he led the tumbling escape from the attic and down the stairs. The other boys ran until they reached their respective homes. And Aleck—no matter what coaxing, what reassurances that the pig was not alive, that he did not kill the pig—Aleck wouldn’t return to the attic.

His father retrieved the corpse and disposed of it.

Despite such failures, Aleck still learned best through trials and seekings and problems, through mistakes and accidents, pounding questions that evaded every attempt at an answer, truths within truths that only experience could unearth, for better or worse.

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The work on the speaking machine was coming along more haltingly than Aleck had expected. He and Melly were stuck and out of patience, but their father emphasized the importance of perseverance, of not turning away in the face of defeat. He reminded his sons of the resources at their disposal, directing them back to the book Wheatstone had lent them, to look into what it was that made voice.

As an elocutionist, Melville’s work was to correct the speech of others. It was the family business: Melville’s brother, David Bell, and father, Alexander Bell, were also famous elocutionists, engaged in the work of speech pathology. They worked with actors and preachers, immigrants and stutterers, to smooth out error and give power to the voice. George Bernard Shaw would draw inspiration from them for the character of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, later remade as My Fair Lady. They helped spread the idea that not only could speech be corrected, people could also be transformed by it.

Melville saw the unique alphabet he was developing as an extension of his work as an elocutionist and also as a technological breakthrough that would be able to reach much further. Unlike alphabets before his, which largely drew their logic from the sounds of particular languages, Melville sought to shape his alphabet around any sounds that the voice was capable of making. By doing this, he believed, he could “convert the unlettered millions in all countries into readers,” and pave “linguistic highways between nations.”

It could allow for quick literacy in a language someone already knew, and though it couldn’t teach people the meanings of words or word order in different languages, it could greatly cut down on how much time it took for people to pronounce different words correctly, as well as to read and write those words. But even without knowledge of a given language, a universal alphabet was of particular use to the British Empire in the age of missionary trips: it allowed an English-speaking missionary to read the Bible in any language needed—they would not have to know the language, only how to pronounce the words, and the Bible’s teachings could reach the ears of anyone they sought to save. He understood his alphabet to be representative of something of the greatest importance: the human voice, which itself represented personhood.

The mid-nineteenth century was still ruled by the centuries-long notion that the very essence of being was embodied by speech. Voice was where language and thought met. This idea, often credited to Aristotle, had begun to meet with more biblical thinking, threading God’s reflection and intention through these ancient ideas. Melville’s own father wrote that “in no higher respect has man been created in the image of his Maker, than in his adaption for speech and the communication of his ideas. The Almighty fiat ‘Let there be light,’ was not more wonderful in its results, than the Creator’s endowing the clay, which he had taken from the ground, with the faculty of speech.”

Philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, in the late eighteenth century, argued that while all animals made sounds, it was humans who brought these sounds together into repeatable units—and in doing so, it was humans who learned to think. “The delicate organs of speech, therefore,” wrote Herder, “must be considered as the rudder of reason, and speech as the heavenly spark, that gradually kindles our thoughts and senses to a flame.” He believed that thought began with voice; our very humanity began with speech. To speak—and speak well—was to be able to think, to be human in the holiest, most complete form.

At the time, these beliefs were also held in their inverse: to be unable to speak was to be not quite human. Groups that did not speak, or did not speak well—immigrants, the developmentally disabled, the deaf, the poor—were often the groups who had the least access to rights. Their lack of voice had led many to deny their full humanity. In ancient Greece and Rome, infanticide of a deaf child was allowed; Jewish tradition granted deaf people neither the rights of adults nor the liability to adult punishment; Christianity often held that they could not be confirmed nor married. They were casually referred to as animals or savages.

Melville wasn’t using those words, and he didn’t believe in the extremes that those ideas represented. Instead, his goal was to use his alphabet to increase access to language and thus to increase access to one another. He was thinking of the many languages and cultures that were coming together under the British Empire—which within the past fifty years had slowly continued to spread to include countries as different as Yemen, Pakistan, Burma, Fiji, and Hong Kong. He was aware of the many conflicts stemming from a persistent inability to communicate. He wanted his alphabet to be a gift to the world, and though he could give lessons and lectures, he would charge nothing for the alphabet itself. He saw his alphabet as “one of the foremost Arts of Peace.” He hoped the British government would cover the cost of the special typeface that was needed so he could actualize this gift.

Melville called his alphabet Visible Speech, because it acted as an instructional guide on how to shape the mouth into different sounds. Each symbol was part of a code of where to put the tongue in the mouth, how to breathe, how open the lips should be. When he was finished, Melville hoped, his alphabet would have the malleability to be used by any language, allowing anyone to participate in the power granted by proper speech.

It was because of his alphabet that he had been curious about Wheatstone’s machine, though that machine echoed for him another he’d seen almost two decades earlier, in 1846: Joseph Faber’s “Euphonia.” Faber was an inventor who’d modeled his speaking machine after the human lungs, larynx, and mouth, placing his device within a fake torso and giving it the head of an automaton. But the effect of Euphonia’s voice, which Faber operated via keyboard, was so monotonous and hollow that one viewer said that it resembled less a human than a half human, “bound to speak slowly when tormented by the unseen power outside.” Faber’s invention became a mockery and faded away.

But for Melville, the importance of both machines was that they showed how the human voice was, in many respects, a machine. If the voice could be replicated, then it could be controlled. If it could be controlled, it could be documented with precision and taught with precision. It could fall into the larger movement to find a universal alphabet, a movement that had been around for over a century. All of this was central to the success of Visible Speech.

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While Melville was working on stoking Aleck’s interest in speech, his mother, Eliza, exerted a gentler influence, training her son’s abilities in attention to sensory detail. She was a pianist who had begun to go deaf in late childhood, and her deafness had only increased with age. Now she rested the ivory mouthpiece of her hearing tube on the soundboard of their piano; she tilted her head to listen. To some extent, Eliza could still hear the instrument’s resonant notes, but more so, she could feel them.

Before Melville had started his efforts to recalibrate Aleck’s career path onto the family profession of elocution, Aleck had wanted to play piano. As a boy, his true love was not speech—not machines or alphabets—but music. When Eliza had taught him to play, he took to the piano full of attention and vigor. He trained his ear along the notes, the vibrations of those wires strung taut. He learned the modulations of sound, could feel and hear them in their tiniest differentiations, their dissonances and synch...