Phillip Adams: Dearly beloved listeners, I am living proof that there is life after deaf. Little by little I started losing my hearing in imperceptible increments until finally it was incapacitating, which is a rather difficult problem if you are in the business of broadcasting. So, these days I sit here with my hearing aids turned up to the max and with the headphones blazing away, which enables me to tackle the next story, a book called The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness, and its author Katie Booth. It’s a fine book which shows us a much different side to Bell, best known of course as the inventor of the telephone. But what isn’t known about Bell is his fraught legacy in the deaf community where he is seen as a villain. This new biography of the famous inventor explores his lifelong quest to teach the deaf to speak, and how his misguided war on sign language nearly destroyed not only a language but an entire and vivid culture.
Katie teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in various mastheads, including Harper’s Magazine. She was raised in a mixed hearing and deaf family, and many of her ancestors were deaf. Katie, welcome.
Katie Booth: Thank you, I’m happy to be here.
Phillip Adams: I vaguely have a memory that Alexander Bell used to clamp his teeth on the frame of a piano, all the better to hear it. But let’s quickly go through his biography. He was born in Scotland.
Katie Booth: Yes, in Edinburgh. His mother was deaf, his father was an elocutionist. Today we would call him a speech pathologist, essentially.
Phillip Adams: And I understand that father Melville invented a phonetic alphabet.
Katie Booth: Yes, he invented an alphabet called visible speech, which sort of showed…through his alphabet he is able to show people how to shape their mouths and how to breathe in order to make different sounds. So, since it was tethered to the mouth and the body, it was an alphabet for any language.
Phillip Adams: And I understand he passed this task on to Alec.
Katie Booth: Yes, he taught all of his sons this alphabet, but specifically Alec started to…Melville gave Alec the task of using the alphabet in order to teach deaf children how to speak.
Phillip Adams: Tragedy strikes the family. Bell’s two brothers die, he falls sick with TB, and in 1870 the family moved to Canada, and Alec mopes around with nothing to do.
Katie Booth: Yes, he finds a little spot on a hill that he calls a ‘sofa-seat’ and just sits there and thinks a lot. And he also befriends the local Mohawk Indian tribe and studies their language, but for the most part he is just moping around for a bit of time. He is also recovering because he was ill.
