INVENTION OF MIRACLES

'Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness' is the sub-title of this revelatory and revisionist biography of the renowned inventor of the telephone, and powerful enemy of the deaf community. 'Deaf people who couldn't speak were often referred to as monkeys, or prehuman. I didn't know that the chief person behind the campaign to keep deaf children from learning ASL (American Sign Language) was the man who most people thought of differently, pleasantly, as the inventor of the telephone. Or that the movement he led would change forever what was expected of the deaf.' When Alexander Graham Bell first unveiled his telephone to the world, it was considered miraculous, but few people know that it was inspired by another supposed miracle - his work teaching deaf people to speak. He was the son of one deaf woman and husband to another, motivated by a desire to empower deaf people by integrating them into the hearing world. But he ended up becoming their most powerful enemy, waging a war against sign language and deaf culture that still rages today. The book tells the dual stories of Bell's remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language. In 1863 at the age of 16, Bell first started work on his speaking machine, with a mechanical body like an organ with keys to depress different portions and exhale full words. His father Alexander Melville Bell was an elocutionist who was designing a universal phonetic alphabet, one that would be able to document any sound in any language. 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 breath, how open the lips should be. Well researched, it is a timely reminder of the flawed humanity that lies behind so much of our technological innovation. 402pp.