[August 2nd marks the 100th anniversary of inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s death. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied some famous phones in American culture, leading up to this special post on AGB’s life and legacies!]
On three
layers and legacies to Bell’s impressive and inspiring life beyond the
telephone.
1)
The
Deaf Community: If there was one main through-line in Bell’s life of
scientific experimentation and invention, it was his desire to better the lives
of deaf and hard of hearing people (and children in particular). His mother Eliza
Grace Bell was deaf, and he would go on to marry a deaf woman, Mabel Hubbard. Some of
his earliest professional experiences involved training instructors at the Boston
School for Deaf Mutes (later the Horace Mann School for the Deaf), the
Hartford American
Asylum for Deaf-mutes, and the Northampton Clarke School for the Deaf.
He went on to open his own School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech
in Boston, where none other than Helen
Keller was one of his pupils. To put it simply, there’s no way to
understand how and why Bell developed the telephone without the contexts of
this lifelong work seeking to, as
Keller herself put it, lessen the “inhuman silence which separates and
estranges.”
2)
Heredity: At times Bell was far too strident
in his opposition
to sign language (seeing it as a separation of the deaf from the rest of
society), leading to understandable critiques of him from the hearing-impaired community.
But in an era when far, far too many of even the most progressive scientists
and thinkers were influenced by the racist
narratives of eugenics, Bell, who had a lifelong interest in
genetics and heredity, seems to have engaged with but ultimately resisted the
frustrating pull of those hierarchical and bigoted ideas. His 1883 paper to the
National Academy of Sciences, “Upon
the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race,” noted a hereditary tendency
toward deafness and expressed concerns about the creation of a segregated deaf
community, but also strongly opposed policies (far too prevalent in the era)
like sterilization or opposition to intermarriage. Bell’s thoughts on genetics
were far from perfect, but I’d argue that they were also more nuanced than far
too many of his peers.
3)
National
Geographic: As that article notes, Bell was one of the founders of the National
Geographic Society, and would go on to serve as its second
president from 1898 to 1903. That role reflects not only his prominence
within the American and global scientific communities at the turn of the
century, but also his commitment to bringing those scientific discoveries and
conversations to broader public audiences. I’ve
written before about Bell in the context of my problem with narratives of the
iconoclastic individual inventor and genius—there are lots of reasons why that
image is a false and destructive one, but as Bell proves in all these ways, it
also just fundamentally misrepresents many of these figures and their interconnected
lives, careers, and communities.
Annual
birthday posts start Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous historical or cultural phones you’d highlight?
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