Laura Bridgman's Education

Laura Bridgman was the first deafblind person to be educated -- a feat accomplished by Samuel Gridley Howe in the 1830s. People from around the world came to see her, including Charles Dickens, who wrote about her in his "American Travels."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delaine to Chalko Reboarding. And
earlier this year, some interesting news came out of Georgia
Tech here in Atlanta. Researchers there announced that they'd come

(00:23):
up with a texting app called Brail Touch, which applies
computer brail, you know, a specific type of brail to
touch screen devices. And the app has mostly been in
the news because it has potential as a general eyes
free texting app, even for people who aren't visually impaired.
You could text under the table or something. But for

(00:43):
folks who are visually impaired, a Brail app could really
mean a lot less stuff to lug around, no keyboard,
just a phone, and easier communication. And it really got
me thinking about how much communication has improved for people
with visual disabilities in the past century. Yeah, and today
we're going to revisit a subject that we touched on

(01:03):
briefly in our Dickens Visits America episode, and it's kind
of related to that topic of communication. It's about Laura Bridgeman,
who was the first deaf blind person to learn language,
also to communicate with letters in writing, and to be educated.
And she didn't use the now ubiquitous brail system that
we just talked about, which was only beginning at the time,

(01:24):
but instead she used the manual alphabet to spell out words,
and she also read from raised Roman text and I
learned to hand right with a special grid system. So
Bridgeman was about fifty years older than the more famous
Helen Keller. But if you remember from that earlier episode,
their stories are really closely connected, aside from the fact
that young Helen Keller annoyed Bridgeman by stepping on her

(01:47):
foot when the two of them met. But while Keller
really became a champion of disability rights and an international
figuring as somebody who's internationally famous, Bridgeman was on the
earlier end of the disability rights story. And in fact,
when she started school in the eighteen thirties, people were
just starting to believe blind people could be educated, so

(02:09):
the idea of educating a deaf blind person the deaf
blind girl seemed completely impossible. Yeah, so we're going to
tell you a little bit about her early story and
the challenges that she had to face. Before we get
to that story of her learning. Laura Dewey Bridgeman was
born in December twenty one, eighty nine, near Hanover, New Hampshire.

(02:30):
Her parents, Daniel and Harmony, had a farm, and Laura
was their third daughter. She was a pretty baby with
bright blue eyes, but she was really sickly. At twenty
months she finally started getting bigger and lively. She was
chatty and seemed very smart. But at twenty four months
she and her two older sisters came down with scarlet fever.

(02:51):
Her two sisters died, but for Laura the fever went
on four weeks after that, and when she finally started
to get better, she was blind in one nearly blind
in the other death, and she had very little of
her senses of smell and taste left. Her vision in
her non blind eye was destroyed when she walked into
the spindle of her mother's spinning wheel. So a really

(03:14):
sad start here, But remarkably, by age four she had
recovered the strength she had lost during the fever. She
was strong again, and while she wasn't talking anymore, she
was still very smart. She was still displaying that interest
she had as a two year old, and everything she
came across. She would touch everything she encountered. She had
cling to her mother and feel her arms in her

(03:36):
hands and try to mimic her mother's hands. So she
learned how to help out with housework that way. She
even learned how to knit and too so and from
a workman on her family farm, Asa Tenny, who himself
had some impairments that made speech difficult for him, she
did pick up some ability to communicate, or at least
communicate more fully with her family. She he had a

(04:01):
way of sort of understanding what she was going through
and helped her perfect this basic sort of sign language.
And so each family member had a name sign that
they could respond to, and a pat on her head
meant yes or okay, a pat on her back meant no.
She had a way of expressing really basic needs at least.
But by age seven, she started throwing these really violent

(04:23):
temper tantrums. She'd only obey her father, who would stomp
on the ground when he was upset with her. And
she'd reached the limit of communication basically with her family,
and she was just overwhelmed, and they were overwhelmed too.
They were busy farmers and they didn't know what they
were going to do to help her. So fortunately at
that time an article was written by a Dartmouth professor

(04:45):
on Laura's ability to sign, and that got the attention
of Samuel Gridley how And a few years earlier, actually,
the very same year Laura was born, how had founded Perkins,
which was a school for the blind, and it had
open for students in eighteen thirty two with a mission um,
not just to educate blind children, that's kind of how

(05:07):
you'd feel it today, but to really prove that blind
children could be educated and could become independent adults. Kids
at the school learned everything from history to philosophy, plus sports, music,
including piano tuning, and domestic work. So it was really
a very broad education getting them ready for life. How's
quite a character himself, we should mention. He idolized Lord

(05:30):
Byron and fought in the Greek Revolution where Byron died.
He financially supported radical abolitionist John Brown, and he was
married to Julia Ward, who wrote The Battle Him of
the Republic. But he was also a proponent of education reform,
and not just for blind students. He wanted wrote memorization
replaced with a curriculum following the child's interests. He disliked

(05:54):
John Locke's idea of the tabula raza the blank slate,
and instead thought that the mind came with certain innate facilities,
something in line with the pseudoscience of phrenology. Yeah, so
when How heard about Laura, he realized that she would
really be his perfect subject. She was an opportunity for
him to do good and clearly he was very interested
in that. She was excellent pr for his school, and

(06:18):
she'd be a way for him to test his theories
on the mind, and probably most importantly, a challenge for him.
At this point, he was doing so successfully with his school,
he wanted a challenge. So Laura's parents met with How
and they agreed to send her to Perkins and Laura
arrived there in October eighteen thirty seven, when she was

(06:38):
just shy of eight years old. She just got a
little bit of time to settle into her new surroundings.
She was obviously very scared, very disoriented, but How gave
her two weeks to get used to the new world.
So after that generous two week period that she got
he started to teach her. He quickly decided to scrap
the basic sign language that she'd been using at home

(07:01):
and instead teach her English. So here's kind of how
it worked. He would give her something basic like a
key or a fork or a knife that was labeled
with embossed writing, and then after she familiarized herself with
the objects, he'd separate the object from that label and
she would have to match them to each other. Yeah,

(07:21):
and he wrote of this time quote, it was as
though she were underwater and we were on the surface
over her, unable to see her, but dropping a line
and moving it about here and there, hoping it might
touch her hand so that she would grasp it instinctively,
hoping that she would put two and two together and
realize it wasn't just a matching game. These labels actually

(07:45):
signified something about the objects that they went with. But
according to Jane seymour Ford and Perkins, how believed that
her ability to match really was just kind of a game.
It was just memorization. At this point, she liked getting approval,
so she knew the knife label went with the knife,
and and so on. So the next step for him
was to cut up the labels into their separate letters,

(08:08):
and he would spell out the word that she was
familiar with, and he'd jumble them up, and then he
would leave Laura to figure out how to piece them
back together again into something she was familiar with. And
he described the aha sort of moment when she finally
got this that letters made up words, and words signified things,

(08:29):
and he wrote quote, the truth began to flash upon her.
Her intellect began to work. She perceived that here was
a way by which she could herself make a sign
of anything that was in her own mind and show
it to another mind. And at once her countenance lighted up.
So from there Laura tried to learn the name of
every single thing that she encountered. Communication got faster when

(08:52):
she learned the manual alphabet and could put aside those
embossed letters that she had initially learned with. She only
needed about a year of instruction and vocabulary building before
she could join in the regular classes for the blind,
and she would have a personal teacher with her who
was fingerspelling everything out for her so that she could
follow along in class. But other than that, just following

(09:12):
along with the lessons pretty remarkable. One thing to mention here, though,
how promoted Laura's ability that ah sort of moment he
he promoted that is something innate, like she just had
the capacity for language there, but two of her recent biographers,
Elizabeth Jeter and Ernest Freeberg, suggests that she probably did
have some distant memory of spoken language before she was deaf.

(09:34):
Even if she might not have remembered being two years old,
she probably had something left in her head, and Jeter
also thinks that she had likely been imprinted with the
capacity for grammar, since her later ability to understand all
these different complex tenses um kind of put her apart
from a lot of other deafline people who've learned language,

(09:55):
which to me just sounds like another way of saying
innate ability. So maybe so we should also a point
out that while Braille was by this point being used
in some parts of the world, Laura and the other
students that Perkins read with raised Roman letters, which was
known as Boston line type, and it made for some
really huge book because they had to blow up the
letters so big that you could actually feel the differences

(10:16):
between them, and Laura would write with a grooved guide
that was slid under her paper, so you'd write a
letter in one of the grooves cover it and then
move on to the next letter. And it was called
square handwriting because it has this very strange sort of
square look to it. You can you can see letters
that Laura herself wrote, and it is a very unusual

(10:38):
looking hand but pretty remarkable. It sounds pret time consuming,
it does, but apparently she was a voracious letter writer,
so she must have gotten pretty fast at it. And
while she studied reading writing in geography and algebra and
geometry and all the other subjects in the classroom, she
would pepper her teachers with questions at the same time
outside of the classroom, things like why don't flies have names?

(11:02):
Why can't we sail to the sun and boats? If
I eat fish hooks, could I be dead? Questions? Yes,
And she flourished socially too. She could recognize people that
she hadn't seen in a long time by feeling their faces.
She made distinct noises for friends, which were kind of
like individual names that people could recognize other people. And

(11:25):
how describes this sort of girlish social butterfly behavior that
Laura had um in a passage I really liked, he said,
quote when Laura's walking through a passageway with her hands
spread before her. She notes instantly everyone she meets and
pass with them with a sign of recognition. But if
it be a girl of her own age, and especially

(11:46):
if one of her favorites, there is instantly a bright
smile of recognition and intertwining of arms, a grasping of hands,
and a swift telegraphing upon the tiny finger. So I
think that really conveys how happy she was to finally
be able to communicate with people and say what was
on her mind and hear what was going on in
the world. And um, she'd joke around too. That's another

(12:07):
important thing to mention, because she does have a reputation
being older as kind of severe. But as a kid
she'd joke around. She'd purposely misspell words and then strike
it out with the other hand, or she would spell
with her nose when finger spelling instead of her fingers. Um,
she'd spin donuts on her finger, something that she actually
did her her whole life. And when she was alone,

(12:30):
she could entertain herself. She liked to always be able
to ask people questions, but she could entertain herself. She
kept a journal her whole life. She would practice new words,
spelling out the names of new words. She would carry
out these sort of private dialogues, and she would knit
and so and had a very strong sense of fashion.
She was always very neatly dressed, very stylish. She'd sew

(12:52):
all her own clothes and had some things that almost
sound like amazing party tricks. So she could thread a
needle with her tongue. Um, just really cool talents that
kind of get overshadowed by some of the other abilities,
but just these everyday things she was also able to
do an addition to reading and writing. But even in

(13:12):
spite of these more entertaining aspects of her personality and
that sense of humor that she had, Laura would also
still sometimes throw tantrums. And this was something that how
of course, didn't cover much in that pr campaign that
made Laura so famous. She had hit students, sometimes shoved teachers.
She would get very upset with slow finger spellers too,

(13:33):
And since she'd work so closely with her teachers, sometimes
spending twenty four hours a day with them, she had
also formed these really deep attachments and really truly suffer
when changes happened. In her time at Perkins. As a student,
she had four main teachers, Lydia Drew Morton, Eliza Rodgers,
Mary Swift Lambsome, and Sarah White Bond, and she stayed

(13:57):
lifelong friends with all of them, but when they leave
agains to marry or to get new jobs, she would
beg to go with them. And when she would get upset,
when things like this would happen, she wouldn't be able
to eat. And one of those really traumatic transitions came
when How himself Mary Julia Ward in eighteen forty three.
Laura had of course been How's pet project. He promoted

(14:17):
her in medical journals, periodicals, children's magazines enough to make
them both internationally famous. People from around the world would
come to see her, sometimes just visiting, but sometimes just
watching her behind partitions, which Ray it reminded me a
little of some of the Varnum episodes we've been talking about,
which this is around the same time, and um, I

(14:39):
don't know, it's it's a more disturbing side of the story. Yeah,
And another kind of disturbing aspect of this. According to
Louis Menand in The New Yorker, she was so well known,
little girls would poke out their dolls eyes and name
them Laura. A very special kind of fame there, yes,
but Laura also had kind of become How's adopted doll

(15:00):
her by this point. According to seymour Ford at Perkins,
she even lived in his apartment with him and his sisters,
so they were really very close. So Laura was really
feeling kind of abandoned when How married and spent a
year and a half after that on a working honeymoon
in Europe. She wrote to him constantly and often asked
questions about one subject that she was particularly interested in

(15:20):
learning more about, and that was religion. So How had
always planned to include religion in his process of educating Laura,
but he had kind of strange ideas about it. You
normally think of a religious education starting as young as possible,
but he didn't think she should have any kind of
religious instruction until her mid teens, after her physical and

(15:42):
intellectual educations were complete, at least to his idea, So
he hoped that just as she had shown people possessed
some sort of natural innate understanding of language, or at
least he believed that she would also eventually show that
people possessed in innate understanding and love of God. That
was his hope. So his plan when he came back

(16:03):
from his honeymoon was to present her. You know, he
had a plan. Just like his labeling system, he would
present her with these everyday miracles instead of everyday items
like forks and knives, in this case, it would be
something like plants growing from seeds. And he expected that
if she was presented with enough of these, ultimately she'd realize,
just as she'd realize those significance of those embossed letters,

(16:26):
that there was something divine about these things, something divine
about the whole process and also according to Menand he
hoped that these innate inclinations and understandings of hers would
match up with his own Unitarian beliefs rather than more
serious evangelical beliefs. So to make sure that this plan

(16:46):
of education worked, he knew that she needed to have
no sort of religious instruction beforehand, so he banned her
teachers from discussing religion while he was gone, from answering
any kind of questions, and while she was writing him
about religion, he himself didn't really answer questions in the letters,
so she was left pretty frustrated and wondering what was

(17:09):
going on. Yeah, knowing curious Laura, by this point, you
can probably guess what happened. She managed to get something
out of her teacher, Mary Swift, and she was also
secretly visited by a group of evangelicals who were protesting
How's methods. She was attracted to what they told her,
and evangelical religion became a major part of her life

(17:30):
from then on. When How finally came back, he was
disappointed that his plan had been wrecked and he kind
of wrote the whole thing off as a failure, not
just the religious education, but educating Laura almost Yeah, he
became more distant from her after this, and according to
men and he even said that her religious education was
the greatest disappointment of his life, and it caused him

(17:52):
to take back some of the praise he had for
the blind in general. So he took a very extreme
took it pretty hard, got finitely. But when Laura was
about twenty years old, her last and favorite teacher, Sarah White,
left to be married, and at this point, especially considering
that she and How had drifted apart by this point,

(18:13):
a little bit um school was going to be over
for Laura. So she stayed on at Perkins for a time,
but she really found life a lot lonelier and isolated
without having a constant companion with her anymore. So it
was thought best by everyone that she'd go home to
her family farm. That didn't really work out either. The
family was too busy running the farm, doing their everyday

(18:36):
things that they did, and um, they didn't have time
for the twenty four hour companionship and the constant questions
that she was used to, and so she started to
get depressed, she started to get sick, and how eventually
got worried enough to loop in Dorothea Dix, who we've
talked about on an earlier podcast, UM, who was also
a friend of Laura's, to help raise the money for

(18:58):
a lifetime endowment for her to live at Perkins as
long as she wanted to. She ended up staying there
for the rest of her life, returning to her family
farm only for summers. As an adult. At the school,
she lived in a cottage and she taught needlework. Apparently
she was a really strict teacher too. I think we
mentioned that before. At the point if you if you
didn't have neat stitches, she'd just make you rip the

(19:20):
whole thing out and start over. That's tough, but she'd
also read a lot. She'd write letters constantly, she'd travel
occasionally to she'd knit, she'd embroider, she'd make lace and
so things to sell to people who came to see her.
Often she would include an attached autograph with that, and
she liked having money of her own. She liked having

(19:41):
some money to give to charity and buy presents for
her friends while she was home. One summer, she was
baptized in a brook near the family farm, and she
also convinced the pastor's wife to learn the manual alphabet
so that they could communicate and that way Laura could
get more religious instruction. And we mentioned this a little
bit when talking about her her sense of humor. But

(20:01):
to strangers she did seem less friendly and less pleasant
as she grew older, but perhaps that's in part due
to all her losses. She got very close to her
younger sister on these trips back to the farm um
and her sister passed away, how died in eighteen seventy six,
and just within a year or so after that, two
of her teachers died. So at age fifty nine, Laura

(20:24):
got sick with erysipolis, which is a streptococcus infection and
died May eighty nine. The last word that she spelled
out was a mother. A year before she died. Though
Laura did meet Helen Keller, and as we mentioned, the
eight year old annoyed Laura by stepping on her foot.
Bad first impression. But Keller's parents, who were dealing with

(20:48):
the same tantrums that Laura's family had dealt with years earlier,
happened to read Dickens eighteen forty two American Travels, where,
if you'll remember from the Dickens podcast, he wrote at
length about the then since sational twelve year old Laura
who was imprisoned in a quote more marble cell. He
was very poetic in his descriptions of her, and the
promise of Laura's story made Keller's parents contact Perkins, where

(21:12):
they were connected with recent grad and Sullivan a good
friend of Laura's and someone who was familiar with Howe's
method of instruction. So the famous ah ha moment in
Keller's story came when Sullivan spelled out water on Keller's
hand while running water over the other. It's a very
famous scene that I think we all probably learned grad
school yet exactly and Keller is though I guess I

(21:35):
should say Bridgeman is so closely connected with Keller because
of that link in her parents and Dickens and all
of that. But Keller did always acknowledge Bridgeman's earlier education
and its effect on her own life. But Laurie's story
is maybe best summed up with something that she said
as a child, when her teacher was explaining to her

(21:56):
that while most people had five senses, she just had
three senses. And according to Krista de Luzio in American
nineteenth Century History, Laura thought about this for a moment
and then she answered her teacher that no, she actually
had one more sense than that. She had the sense
of touch, She had taste, smell, and then a fourth sense,

(22:19):
which she called think. And I mean that, how does
that not just sum up everything she learned and did.
That you can think, but if you have the ability
to express it, you can live a full life. Yeah,
And it really was kind of sense for her and
made her be able to function in a way that
you know, quote typical people could. It did so, UM,

(22:43):
I found Laura Bridgman's story very interesting and UM, maybe
still consider doing something on Helen Keller uh Louis Braille
to another another I ran into in this research process,
all very interesting characters. But I think that's probably a
good time for us to go to listener mail. So

(23:05):
this email is from Matt and he wrote to us
about our real life Indiana Jones episode. And here's what
he had to say. I'm a professional archaeologist who spends
a good deal of time trying to explain what my
job is really like. Field work is a part of
what I do, though it is a professional undertaking and
not an adventurous one. But I also spent a lot
of time writing reports, researching regulations, in speaking with government officials.

(23:30):
In other words, my job better resembles an episode of
Parks and Recreation than Raiders the Lost Ark, of course. Um.
He went on to say. I've also discovered that being
listed in the phone book under archaeologists often results in
odd people bringing odd objects to my office. A few
weeks ago, I was called over to the office of
one of the other archaeologists who works for my company.

(23:52):
A woman was sitting in his extra chair while he
stood over his desk, staring down at three items spread
out on it. A large chunk of sandstone with a
crude face carved on it, a pestle carved from an
unknown stone with a strange ridge pattern on the handle,
and a soapstone carving of a crouching man with his
hands clenched at his chest. My coworker took photos and

(24:14):
we both asked questions. Seems the objects were given to
this woman by an elderly lady who had once lived
on a large estate in Mexico. However, our visitor's grasp
of Spanish, couple with the donor's grasp of English, were
insufficient to allow a more detailed description of the item's
provenance to be gained. So we have sent the photos
onto a few people we know who are experts in

(24:36):
Aztec and Mesoamerican archaeology. Well, this will of course have
a mundane resolution. We'll find out what these objects are
and let her know, But it should be noted we
will not describe the monetary value of them, as we
do not want to encourage looting. This seems like the
sort of thing that belongs in an adventure movie. A
woman who naturally was a redhead, dressed all in black

(24:57):
comes by our office asking our opinion about three serious
artifacts that came to her by way of a convoluted route,
and she can't find information on what they are or what,
if anything, they mean. I spend a lot of time
trying to disabuse people of the notion that my job
in any way resembled an Indiana Jones's story. And then
that happens. So we thought that was pretty funny. And

(25:21):
he said that one of these days they're just expecting
some guy in a trench coat to come by and
and um, you know, you can imagine the restaurant there. Yeah,
I mean, if any funny super drama would start. Yeah,
So thank you Matt for writing in and sharing. Sharing
a little peek into the life of a real archaeologist

(25:41):
sounds pretty fun, it does. It sounds more exciting than
I think you think your job is. I mean, we
sit in cubicles all day, so we do so. Yeah,
parks and recreation sounds pretty good. That's true. So if
you'd like to write with us and share some personal
experiences you have that are related to podcast topics we've done,
or maybe you us have a top podcast topic that

(26:01):
you want to suggest, you can write to us and
let us know we're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
You can also look us up on Facebook and we're
on Twitter at Myston History. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about Braill, we do have
an article called how Brail Works. You can look for
that by searching for Braill on our homepage at www.
Dot How stuff works dot com. For more on this

(26:26):
and thousands of other topics, is it how staff works
dot com.