The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katie Booth teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Catapult, McSweeney’s, and Harper’s Magazine, and has been highlighted on Longreads and Longform; “The Sign for This” was a notable essay in the 2016 edition of Best American Essays. Booth received a number of prestigious fellowships to support the research for The Invention of Miracles, including from the Library of Congress and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She was raised in a mixed hearing and deaf family. This is her first book.

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Chapter 1

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...