The Invention of Miracles

This is well-ploughed turf; in 2006, I covered the same ground in my biography of Bell, Reluctant Genius, to which Booth refers. Where Booth departs from a standard biography is in the second half of her book, which almost ignores all his post-telephone scientific enquiries into sound, flying machines, and hydrofoils. Instead, she devotes her attention to Bell’s activities around deaf education.

Both Bell and his father-in-law were firmly on the side of oralists in the late-nineteenth-century battle between advocates of oralism and champions of ASL. They were convinced that unless the deaf learned to speak they would be isolated and stigmatized as “defective.” Bell did not want to see the elimination of sign language, as some oralists did, but he did believe that “learning sign language stood in the way of social advancement.” In contrast, ASL proponents argued that only a small minority of deaf children could learn to speak perfectly and that a preoccupation with that skill meant that basic education was being sacrificed.

Booth acknowledges that, in Bell’s lifetime, no one understood that the first five years of a child’s life are crucial for the acquisition of language, and that language is key to further intellectual and emotional development; children who miss the language-acquisition window suffer irreversible brain damage. She also acknowledges that Bell was not the most active oralist. But she insists that, as the inventor of the telephone, “everything he believed was imbued with a sense of … genius,” so his words carried disproportionate weight. She blames him for the victories oralists won in his day, and also for the stigma attached to deafness that still lingers and that made her grandmother’s hospital experience so wretched.

The anger that permeates the prologue to The Invention of Miracles erupts as the author examines Bell’s temporary flirtation with the false science of eugenics. She ignores the context: Plenty of other people in the English-speaking world, including British playwright George Bernard Shaw and Canadian politician Tommy Douglas, toyed with such ideas until they realized their danger. Bell’s proeugenics phase, suggests Booth, was “the most damning” of his career. He had lost touch with humanity, she suggests, and started “playing God.”

Every biography should be a reassessment of its subject, so having a new perspective on the career of Alexander Graham Bell is refreshing. Today we know that Bell was on the losing side of the deaf-education argument. ASL has triumphed thanks to modern appreciation of brain development and the powerful insistence by the deaf themselves of their right to form a separate community.

However, Booth’s negative attitude towards Bell distorts her treatment of another controversial aspect of Bell’s career — the 1876 telephone patent. Ever since the patent application was first filed by Gardiner Hubbard, there have been questions about whether Hubbard manipulated the process. A couple of writers have also suggested that Bell himself cheated, by copying some details from a caveat (a notice of intent to patent) filed by Elisha Gray. There is some evidence to support accusations against Hubbard, but the evidence to substantiate accusations against Bell is, at best, sketchy. However, Booth takes it as fact.

Booth has written a compelling account of society’s assumptions about disability and the assertion of deaf rights. But she has done a disservice to Alexander Graham Bell by casting a shadow on his character and by laying so much responsibility for ableism on his shoulders.