Alexander Graham Bell Writes to Leading Female Deaf Educator

In this interesting letter, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, whose mother went deaf when he was a child and whose wife was deaf, writes to an educator of the deaf at her North Carolina summer home. Mrs. Katherine T. Bingham was married to a naval commander, and they had two deaf sons. She became a leading proponent of educating deaf children with hearing children and published several papers on the subject in national journals. Bell had a lifelong interest in sound and the education of the deaf, passions that led to his experiments resulting in the invention of the telephone.

With the proceeds of an 1880 award from the French government for the development of the telephone, Bell established the Volta Fund and the Volta Bureau to conduct research on deafness. Bell conducted a school for the deaf in Washington, D.C., between 1883 and 1885. He promoted "oralism," the approach of suppressing sign language in favor of teaching speech and lipreading to children. He considered his greatest contribution to be not the invention of the telephone but his contributions in behalf of the oral education of the deaf.

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, Autograph Letter Signed, to Mrs. Bingham, March 21, 1884, Washington, D.C. 1 p., 8" x 10". Expected folds; tape on upper edge of verso; text is somewhat faint.

In 1899, Katherine T. Bingham delivered an influential paper entitled "All Along the Line" to the National Education Association, meeting in Los Angeles, California. She noted that "Horace Mann first recognized the deaf child as an individual, as capable of the same kind and degree of education as nay child, and he first set forth the idea of the co-ordination of his education with that of hearing." Like Bell, she felt that teaching sign language had negative effects: "the fatal habit of silence is formed and the pernicious practice of pantomime confirmed." She insisted that "One out of every fifteen hundred children of the United States is born deaf, it is said; but it is only the ignorance or neglect of their friends that renders them dumb." She praised Alexander Graham Bell for his role in establishing "oral day schools for the deaf" in Wisconsin, "to whose world-wide fame as a scientist is added the yet greater honor of being the veritable apostle of speech for the deaf." She also praised his experiments in "the practice school of Dr. Bell in Washington" for teaching speech to deaf students.

Complete Transcript
Mrs. Bingham / Highlands Macon Co. / N. Carolina.
Scott Circle
Washington, D.C.
March 21st 1884
Dear Mrs Bingham
I am anxious to have the opportunity of seeing you in reference to my little school here. I made up my mind to leave here last night for North Carolina but was only deterred by the uncertainty of the connections at the end of the railroad line. I cannot find that any railroad runs anywhere near Highlands in Macon Co. and I presume that connection can only be made by driving. Will you kindly give me information how to reach you and the length of time that would be required. I would ask you to visit me here if possible but I would like to see your children and your little pupils. I think you said one of them were deaf?
If I find I can visit you without much loss of time, I will do so. I have been in New York for some time and have been unable to communicate with you till now.
Yours very truly
Alexander Graham Bell

Historical Background
Alexander Graham Bell's father, grandfather, and brother were all associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and his wife were deaf. His research on hearing and speech eventually led to his receiving the first U.S. patent for the telephone on March 7, 1876.

Bell and his partners offered to sell his telephone patent to Western Union outright for $100,000. The president of Western Union viewed the telephone as nothing but a toy, but two years later told his colleagues that if he could purchase the patent for $25 million, he would consider it a bargain. Bell's investors became millionaires, and Bell himself earned well from the residuals. He introduced the telephone to an international audience at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

The Bell Telephone Company was organized in 1877, and by 1886, more than 150,000 people in the United States owned telephones. In January 1915, Bell and Watson made the first transcontinental telephone call, with Bell in New York City and Watson in San Francisco.

A few days after the establishment of the Bell Telephone Company in July 1877, Bell married his former student Mabel Hubbard (1857-1923) at the Hubbard estate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they had four children between 1878 and 1883, though only two survived to adulthood. Bell became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and displayed intense curiosity as a child. He created his first invention at age 12 for a nearby flour mill. He taught himself to play the piano and learned a manual finger language to tell his mother about conversations as she began to lose her hearing. His father wrote several works on elocution, including The Standard Elocutionist (1860), which taught the deaf to articulate words and read lips and went through many editions in Great Britain and the United States. The family moved to London in 1865, where Bell worked as an instructor and continued experiments on sound. He taught two deaf-mute girls at a school for the deaf in London. After both of his brothers died, Bell's father decided to move his remaining family to Canada. There, he learned the Mohawk language from nearby Native Americans and translated its unwritten vocabulary. In 1871, he moved to Boston to teach his father's Visible Speech system of phonetic symbols to the instructors at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes (now Horace Mann School for the Deaf). He was so successful that he taught faculty in other schools in New England as well. He opened a school in Boston for deaf pupils to great success. One of his early students was a young Helen Keller. Controversially, he favored lip-reading and speaking for the deaf over sign language. In 1872, he became a professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston School of Oratory, but soon he decided to focus on his experiments with sound. By the mid-1870s, Bell thought that it might be possible to generate undulating electrical currents that responded to sound waves and that metal reed tuned to different frequencies could convert the undulating currents back into sound. Bell attracted financial support from Gardiner Hubbard, the father of one of his pupils, and others, and with the assistance of Thomas A. Watson, an electrical designer and mechanic, Bell began experiments in acoustic telegraphy. In March 1876, Bell received a patent for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically. His telephone became an instant success, bringing wealth to Bell and his investors. He also invented in other areas, ultimately receiving 18 patents in his name alone and 12 more with collaborators. Fourteen of these patents were for the telephone and telegraph, and four more were for the photophone, which transmitted sound on a beam of light, a precursor to modern fiber-optic communications. He worked extensively in medical research and invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. From 1898 to 1903, Bell served as the second president of the National Geographic Society, and he was a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution from 1898 to 1922.

Katherine Tarr Bingham (1842-1922) was born in Missouri and moved to California in 1872. She married John Floyd Bingham (1840-1891), a commander in the U.S. Navy, and she traveled around the world several times with him. Because their two sons, Horace Tarr Bingham (b. 1868) and Floyd Fitz Tarr Bingham (b. 1879), were deaf, she educated them to speak and became a published authority on the education of the deaf. She and her husband purchased land in September 1882 in Highlands, North Carolina, and built the summer cottage of "Kalalanta" in 1883 but sold it in April 1884. Bingham was "known throughout the world for her work in the education of the deaf" and was a founder of the California Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Woman's Suffrage Society.

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