I Can Hear You Whisper (8 page)

To Deaf historians, Bell committed some unforgivable sins. Worse than his push for oralism were his views on genetics, a hot topic in late-nineteenth-century scientific circles. At the lodge he and Mabel built as a second home in Nova Scotia, he conducted years of sheep breeding experiments. When he turned
his interest in heredity to the deaf, he launched extensive studies of deaf ancestry in places with higher than normal incidence of deafness, like Martha's Vineyard. (At the time, roughly half of the cases of hearing loss in the United States were due to infectious disease.) In 1883, Bell published a paper warning of the risk that deaf intermarriage would result in deaf children. He urged the deaf to socialize with and marry hearing people and even raised the possibility of a law forbidding marriage among the deaf, though he ended by dismissing the idea as unworkable. Even in the context of the age, the paper was deeply offensive to deaf people. There was a storm of attention that sullied Bell's reputation.

Hero to some, villain to others, Bell may have been neither, according to deaf education expert Marc Marschark, who maintains, “
He was not as clearly definite in his beliefs about language as is often supposed.” Bell's writings hint at the complexities that still reverberate. Bell believed the deaf should strive to join the hearing majority, but he also defended “the de l'Epée language” as “a complete language.” He noted that while he preferred an oral approach for the “semi-deaf” or “semi-mute” (i.e., hard of hearing), for the rest he “was not so sure.” And Bell regularly set a trap for people by way of demonstrating just how hard speechreading could be.

“It rate ferry aren't hadn't four that reason high knit donned co,” Bell would say.

“It rained very hard and for that reason I did not go,” a lip-reader would say, diligently repeating what he thought Bell had said.

To the argument that sign language was easier, Bell countered that just because Italian is easier than English doesn't mean Americans should abandon their native tongue.

Until the late twentieth century and the advent of cochlear implants, the most decisive moment in the battle between speech and sign came in 1880 at an international
conference of deaf educators in Milan. The conference passed a resolution declaring the “incontestable superiority of speech over signs” and that the simultaneous use of sign “injured” the development of speech and should be prohibited. In short order, many deaf schools around the world switched from teaching sign to “pure oralism” (left to themselves, the students communicated through sign). Between 1900 and 1920, the number of
deaf students in America being educated in the oral method went from 40 to 80 percent. Signing was forbidden.

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History is never black and white; it is tinted by those who tell it.

According to Harlan Lane, who is hearing and an ardent advocate of Deaf culture, “
oralist tradition is a story of greed, plagiarism, secrecy, trickery—but not education. Its aim is speech.” Lane's virulence and absolutism put me off, but through him I glimpsed some uncomfortable truths and saw deaf history as many in Deaf culture view it. (Lane has admitted, however, that relatively few deaf people are able to read his books.)

By contrast, David Wright, who learned to talk before he went deaf at seven from meningitis, was a product of a successful oral education, and he ends by making a case against the isolation of deaf schools—at least in his time, the 1930s and 1940s. “
The weather of the two worlds, of the deaf and the hearing, is different: in passing from one to the other you have to become acclimatized,” he wrote. “From the day I entered the deaf school, I had begun to live a schizoid life, to develop two simultaneous personalities.” Wright admits that not everyone would be able to make the choice for the hearing world as he did. “It is almost impossible to exaggerate the narrow scope of the general information of a deaf-born boy whose vocabulary may sometimes be too scanty to allow him to browse over a popular newspaper,” he said in describing a class at his deaf school. “
If knowledge can be compared to light, most hearing people live in a twilight precinct with one or two brightly lit patches—subjects with which they have special acquaintance. But my companions, it seemed to me, existed in a pitch-blackness shot through with a few concentrated beams of painfully gathered information.” Even for Wright, oral education was a steep climb. When he graduated from Oxford in 1942, not more than a half dozen or so other deaf students had graduated from any English university. That fact, he acknowledged, was “
a commentary on the recentness and difficulty of the higher education of the deaf.”

Seventy years later, the problem can no longer be called recent, but it is still stubbornly difficult.

I
nto the twentieth century, doctors tried a variety of measures, including the cruel and the crackpot, to repair damaged ears. A French physician,
Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, used leeches, pierced eardrums, catheterized the ear, and fractured the skull by striking just behind the ear with a hammer. And Itard was working for Epée. “Medicine does not work on the dead,” he concluded, “and as far as I am concerned the ear is dead in the deaf-mute. There is nothing for science to do about it.” You can almost hear the harrumph of a man who has been defeated by a problem beyond his abilities. You can also hear the sound of a deaf person's skull cracking. Nineteenth-century doctors, if you can call them that, were operating in the dark. They knew very little about how hearing really worked. The aid they offered was limited to ear trumpets, which, like an expanded version of a cupped hand behind the ear, could be aimed at the source of sound to amplify it ever so slightly.

People knew very little about sound as well. The ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras conducted experiments with vibrating strings in 500
BC,
and Leonardo da Vinci was the first to recognize that sound traveled in waves. But grasping what happened when those waves washed over the ear, how they traveled to the brain and were understood as speech or music or noise, was a problem of another order.

German physician
Hermann von Helmholtz was a man of many interests, including physiology, mathematics, thermodynamics, optics, and acoustics. His invention of the ophthalmoscope made it possible to study the interior of the eye, and he advanced the understanding of the perception of color. His 1863 book, the very one that captivated Alexander Graham Bell, has been described as “monumental” and is still used in psychoacoustics, the study of human perception of sound. Helmholtz invented a resonator, a device to intensify and enrich sound by adding vibration, and used it to identify the frequencies of complex sounds. His resonance—or harp—theory described what might happen in the ear when sensing a sound. He captured some of the basics correctly: that air passing through the outer ear set first the middle ear bones and then the fluid of the inner ear in motion. He also theorized that parts of the basilar membrane vibrated “sympathetically” with specific tones and less strongly for other tones, and sent related messages to the nerves.

The capacity to confirm that Helmholtz was onto something and to measure what was really happening in the ear had to wait for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. It's true that the advent of the telephone made it much more difficult for anyone who didn't hear well to participate in the larger society. For the deaf and hard of hearing, there was irony in the romantic vision many held of the telephone: “
With one broad sweep the barriers of time and space are gone and all the world becomes our vocal neighborhood,” wrote Harold Arnold, the director of research at
Bell Laboratories in the early part of the twentieth century. Yet the effort to perfect the telephone and extend its reach had some unexpected benefits. Western Electric's engineering department was reorganized and rechristened Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1925. Later consolidated with AT&T's engineering department, it would become synonymous with scientific innovation. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Bell Labs building on West Street near the Hudson River in lower Manhattan drew some of the brightest scientific minds in the country and paid them to develop one breakthrough after another, including the vacuum tube, the transistor, and the concept of information theory. Those scientists also, for several decades, knew more than almost anyone else in the world about sound, speech, and hearing.

That research was led by a man named
Harvey Fletcher. A Utah native who joined Bell Labs during World War I, Fletcher had done his doctoral work in physics at the University of Chicago with Robert Millikan and taken part in the famous “oil-drop experiment” to establish the charge of all electrons in the universe. At Bell, working for Harold Arnold, whom he had known at Chicago, Fletcher “got into acoustics” as he put it in a 1963 interview. Others warned him that
“all there was to know about acoustics had already been discovered,” but he proved just how little those scientists knew about how much they didn't know. Fletcher set out to “
accurately describe every part of the system from the voice through the telephone instruments to and including the ear,” he wrote.

Reading his landmark 1929 book,
Speech and Hearing
, I was surprised by how many of its observations still spoke to my own experience and search for knowledge. I was reminded how much I had taken hearing for granted. “
The atmosphere of sounds in which we live ministers so constantly to our knowledge and enjoyment of our surroundings that through long familiarity we have come to feel, if not contempt, at least indifference toward the marvelous mechanism through which it works,” wrote Harold Arnold in the introduction to
Speech and Hearing
. “Hearing, we are inclined to consider as little a matter for concern as breathing; and so long as our own faculty remains unimpaired we feel little curiosity concerning the provisions of nature either for ourselves or for others.” In a later edition, Fletcher wrote: “
The processes of speaking and hearing are very intimately related, so much so that I have often said that we speak with our ears. We can listen without speaking but cannot speak without listening.”

Fletcher and Arnold's research team approached the problem methodically. “The attack was first launched most vigorously on the constitution of speech,” wrote Fletcher. If they could establish a reasonable description of average speech, he thought, they could find out what small imperfections and variations affected intelligibility. Their primary weapon was a machine that could better capture what speech actually looked like by creating pictures of waveforms that would be “
readily interpreted by the eye.” The “high-quality oscillograph” they invented used a telephone transmitter to convert speech waves to electrical waves, which were then magnified with an amplifier and sent into an oscillograph, where they caused a tiny ribbon to vibrate. That motion was photographed on a moving film. Fletcher notes almost offhandedly that in order to create “
the perfection of this instrument,” they first had to invent three other critical devices: a condenser transmitter that could be calibrated, a vacuum tube to produce the amplification and electrical oscillations, and the basic oscillograph itself.

Like children with a new camera, the Bell researchers used their new device to make wave pictures of a panoply of letters and words. A host of speakers, known to history as “M.A.—Male, Low-Pitched,” and “F.D.—Female, High-Pitched,” and the like, put their lips about three inches from the transmitter and intoned lists of vowel sounds—the “u” of “put,” for example—and words such as “seems” and “poor.” The results established some general characteristics of speech sounds. That the pitch of the voice varies with individuals, for instance. A “deep-voiced man” spoke vowels at about ninety cycles per second—or ninety hertz—and a “high shrill-voiced woman” (F.D. perhaps?) at about three hundred cycles per second. They also noticed that when that same man and woman spoke the “ah” sound in “father,” the wave pictures looked quite different, “yet the ear will identify them as the vowel ‘a' more than 99 percent of the time.” Whereas two low-pitched male voices pronouncing “i” as in “tip” and “o” as in “ton” create much more similar pictures, “yet they are never confused by the ear.” The Bell team had tumbled to the fact that speech sounds carried some other important characteristic that didn't show up in the waveform. Later, that characteristic was given a name: timbre.

Even I, untrained in reading waveforms and spectrograms, could see that the separate sounds in a simple word like “farmers,” casually uttered in an instant, carried detailed and identifiable information that distinguished it from “alters” almost like the fingerprints that distinguish my right hand from my husband's. The very high frequencies in the “f” and the “s” sounds at the beginning and end of “farmers” are so rapid they look like a nearly straight line. The “a,” “r,” and “m” sounds in the middle show up as peaks and valleys of varying sharpness and depth—the “r” spiking then rolling, spiking then rolling, and the “m” flatter but still undulating like a line of mesas in the desert. All three sounds hovered at the same frequency of 120 cycles per second. The “er” toward the end of the word brought a slight rise in pitch to 130 cycles. “
Farmers,” I said out loud. Sure enough, I raised my voice in the second syllable, a fact I had never noticed before. From this work, I could draw a direct line to the audiogram chart Jessica O'Gara had given me, so I could see where the main frequencies of various phonemes in the English alphabet fell.

Fletcher and his team spent particular time on vowels. Vowels are distinguished from consonants in the way they are formed in our vocal tracts. Critically, they are also at the heart of each syllable. Syllables, I was going to learn, are an essential ingredient in the recipe that allows us to hear and process spoken language. No wonder all languages require vowels. Expanding on Helmholtz's and Bell's investigations into the complexities of vowel sounds, the men of Bell Labs identified not just the fundamental frequencies of “ah” and “oo,” for instance, but also the accompanying harmonic frequencies that readily distinguish one sound from the other. From that, they generated tables showing two primary frequencies—one lower, one higher—for each vowel sound. For telephone engineers, such information “
makes it possible to see quickly which frequencies must be transmitted by the systems to completely carry all the characteristics of speech.”
After World War II, two more Bell researchers were able to use another pioneering device, the spectrograph, to create definitive specifications of vowel frequencies, known as formants. What none of those early researchers could possibly guess was that decades later, a different generation of engineers would use the formant information compiled at Bell Labs to figure out how to transmit the necessary frequencies through a cochlear implant to make speech intelligible to the deaf.

They did see the potential to help in other ways immediately. With his new arsenal of oscillators, amplifiers, and attenuators, Harvey Fletcher could for the first time accurately measure hearing, because he could now produce a known frequency and intensity of tone. He patented
the audiometer that was the forerunner of the machines used in Alex's hearing test. His group also
created the decibel to measure the intensity of sound as perceived by humans, and they established the range of normal hearing as
20 to 20,000 Hz. The range of speech from a
whisper to a yell proved to span about sixty decibels. The new audiometer could measure noise as well, which allowed the editors of the August 1926 issue of
Popular Science Monthly
to note that a Bell Labs device had identified the corner of
Thirty-Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue as the noisiest place in New York City. A decade later, Bell scientists capitalized on demonstrations at the
1939 World's Fair and measured the hearing of enough curious fairgoers that they were able to show just how much hearing degrades from the teenage years into late middle age.

Fletcher's newfound abilities and equipment brought him some interesting visitors. When American industrialist and philanthropist
Alfred I. duPont couldn't hear what was being said at his own board meetings, he turned to Bell Labs for help. After a childhood swimming accident in the Brandywine River, duPont's hearing had gotten progressively worse, and he was almost entirely deaf as an adult. DuPont told Fletcher that his ability to hear fluctuated. It improved after X-ray beam treatment from a doctor he was seeing, then worsened again. Skeptical, Fletcher asked to accompany duPont on his next visit to the doctor. Beforehand, Fletcher measured duPont's hearing himself and created a picture of his considerable hearing loss using what he called an “embryo audiometer.”
According to Fletcher, the doctor treating duPont had a very different technique.

There was a path along the floor . . . about 20 feet long. Mr. Dupont was asked to stand at one end of this. The doctor stood at the other end and said in a very weak voice, “Can you hear now?” Mr. Dupont shook his head. [The doctor] kept coming closer and asking the same question in the same weak voice until he came to about two feet from his ear, where [Mr. Dupont] said he could hear. His hearing level was found to be two feet.

Mr. Dupont then was asked to stand four or five feet in front of an X-ray tube with his ear facing the tube. The X-ray was turned on two or three times. He then turned his other ear toward the tube and had a similar treatment. He then stood in the 20 foot path and another hearing test was made. But this time as he started to walk toward Mr. Dupont [the doctor] shouted in a very loud voice: “Do you hear me now?” As the doctor reached the 10 or 15 foot mark, Mr. Dupont's eyes twinkled and he said he could hear.

I could hardly keep from laughing. . . .

When they returned to the laboratory, Fletcher measured duPont's hearing again and found it unchanged. “After that,” noted Fletcher, “Mr. Dupont never paid a visit to this doctor.”

Fletcher and duPont then turned to the problem of the board meetings. The invention of the telephone had led to the first electronic hearing aids by making it possible to manipulate attributes of sound like loudness and frequency as well as to measure distortion. (Likewise, the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in the 1950s would revolutionize hearing aid technology by making the devices smaller and more powerful.) One early electronic hearing aid apparently consisted of a battery attached to a telephone receiver. For duPont to hear all the participants in a meeting, Fletcher set up a system with two microphones in the center of the boardroom table and two telephone receivers (one for each ear) attached to a headband for duPont to wear. Hidden under the table was a desk-size set of amplifiers, transformers, and condensers. By using two receivers instead of one, duPont was able to tell where the speaker was. “And that,” said Fletcher, “was
the first hearing aid Bell Labs ever made.” Later,
Fletcher made hearing aids for Thomas Edison as well, though Edison later complained that his hearing aids had revealed to him that speakers at the public events he attended said little of interest.