March 30, 2019 • 24 mins
Today we're revisiting the 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina on Laura Bridgman, 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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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. This classic is coming out during Deaf
History Month, which goes from March thirteenth to April fifteenth
each year. It's first Today commemorates the successful conclusion of
the Deaf President Now Protests, which we covered in a
previous episode of the show that has also been a
previous Saturday Classic, and then the last day of Deaf
(00:23):
History Month marks the establishment of the American School for
the Deaf, which was the first permanent school for the
deaf in the United States. So today we're sharing one
of our earlier episodes related to Deaf History, which is
on Laura Bridgeman. She was the first deaf blind person
in the US to receive a formal education, and she
also came up on our recent Saturday Classic on Charles Dickens.
(00:45):
In this episode, Sarah and Bablina talk about potential future
episodes on Helen Keller and Louis Brail, both of whom
are still on our ongoing list of topics. So enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
(01:11):
to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delinea chalk reboarding,
and earlier this year, some interesting news came out of
Georgia Tech here in Atlanta. Researchers there announced that they'd
come 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
(01:32):
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
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
(01:56):
with visual disabilities in the past century. On today, we're
going to revisit a subject that we touched on 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 and writing and to be educated.
(02:16):
And she didn't use the now ubiquitous brail system that
we just talked about, which was only beginning at the time,
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,
(02:39):
their stories are really closely connected, aside from the fact
that young Helen Keller annoyed Bridgeman by stepping on her
foot when the two of them metum. But while Keller
really became a champion of disability rights and an international figure,
you know, somebody who's internationally famous, Bridgeman was on the
earlier end of the disability right story. And in fact,
(03:01):
when she started school in the eighteen thirties, people were
just starting to believe blind people could be educated. So
the idea of educating a deaf, blind person, this 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
(03:21):
to that story of her learning. Laura Dewey Bridgeman was
born December twenty one, eighty nine, near Hanover, New Hampshire.
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
(03:43):
chatty and seemed very smart. But at twenty four months
she and her two older sisters came down with scarlet fever.
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 eye, nearly blind,
and the other death and she had very little of
(04:03):
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
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
(04:23):
was still very smart. She was still displaying that interest
she had as a two year old in everything she
came across. She would touch everything she encountered. She had
cling to her mother and feel her arms in her
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
(04:44):
a workman on her family farm, Asa Tenney, 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 had a way
of sort of understanding what she was going through and
helped her perfect this basic sort of sign language. And
(05:06):
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
temper tantrums. She'd only obey her father, who would stomp
on the ground when he was upset with her. And
(05:28):
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
on Laura's ability to sign, and that got the attention
(05:48):
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
opened for students in eighteen thirty two with a mission um,
not just to educate blind children, that's kind of how
you'd see it today, but to really prove that blind
children could be educated and could become independent adults. Kids
(06:13):
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 Byron and fought in the Greek Revolution where Byron died.
He financially supported radical abolitionist John Brown, and he was
(06:37):
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
John Locke's idea of the tabula raza the blank slate,
and instead thought that the mind came with certain innate
(06:59):
for sility, 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. Clearly, he was very interested
in that. She was excellent pr for his school, and
she'd be a way for him to test his theories
(07:20):
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 eighty seven, when she was just
shy of eight years old. She just got a little
(07:41):
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 onerous two week period that she got he
(08:02):
started to teach her. He quickly decided to scrap the
basic sign language that she'd been using at home 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
(08:24):
separate the object from that label and she would have
to match them to each other. Yeah, 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
(08:44):
would put two and two together and realize it wasn't
just a matching game. These labels actually signified something about
the objects that they went with. But according to Jane
seymour Ford and Perkins, help leaved that her ability to
match really was just kind of a game. It was
just memorization. At this point, she liked getting approval, so
(09:06):
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, 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 describes
(09:28):
the aha sort of moment when she finally got this
that letters made up words, and words signified things, 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
(09:48):
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
she learned them 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
(10:09):
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
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
(10:30):
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.
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
(10:50):
capacity for grammar, since her later ability to understand all
these different complex tenses um kind of put her apart
from a lot of their deafline people who've learned language,
which to me just sounds like another way of saying inadability.
So maybe so we should also point out that while
Braill was by this point being used in some parts
of the world, Laura and the other students that Perkins
(11:13):
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 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
(11:34):
the next letter. And it was called square handwriting because
it has this very strange sort of square look to it.
You can, um, you can see letters that Laura herself wrote,
and it is a very unusual looking hand, but pretty remarkable.
It sounds really time consuming, it does, but apparently she
was a voracious letter writer, so she must have gotten
pretty fast at it. While she studied reading writing in
(11:57):
geography and algebra and geometry and all the their 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? 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.
(12:20):
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 how describes this sort
of girlish social butterfly behavior that Laura had um in
(12:40):
a passage I really liked, he said, quote When Laura
is walking through a passageway with her hands spread before her,
she notes instantly everyone she meets and passes them with
a sign of recognition. But if it be a girl
of her own age, and especially 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
(13:02):
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 important thing to mention,
because she does have a reputation being older as kind
of severe. But as a kid, she'd joke her on.
She'd purposely misspell words and then strike it out with
(13:25):
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 too, 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,
(13:47):
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 so
all her own clothes and had some things that almost
sound like amazing party tricks too. She could thread a
needle with her tongue. Um, just really cool talents that
(14:10):
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
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
(14:32):
made Laura so famous. She had hit students, sometimes shoved teachers.
She would get very upset with slow finger spellers too,
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,
(14:55):
she had four main teachers, Lydia Drew Morton, Eliza Rodgers,
Mary Swift Lambsome, and Sarah White Bond, and she stayed
lifelong friends with all of them. But when they leave
Perkins 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
(15:15):
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
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
(15:36):
watching her behind partitions which ray, it reminded me a
little of some of the Barnum episodes we've been talking about,
which this is around the same time, and um, I
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
(15:57):
known little girls would poke out their dolls eyes and
named them Laura. A very special kind of fame there, Yes,
but Laura also had kind of become How's adopted daughter
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
(16:18):
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
learning more about, and that was religion. So How had
(16:39):
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
intellectual educations were complete, at least to his idea, So
(17:02):
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 an innate understanding and love of God. That
was his hope. So his plan when he came back
from his honeymoon was to present her. You know, he
had a plan just like his labeling system. He would
(17:23):
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,
that there was something divine about these things, something divine
(17:45):
about the whole process. And also, according to Menan, 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
of education worked, he knew that she needed to have
(18:05):
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
going on. Yeah, knowing curious Laura by this point, you
(18:28):
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
from then on. When How finally came back, he was
(18:48):
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 or after this, and according to
menand he even said that her religious education was the
greatest disappointment of his life, and it caused him to
take back some of the praise he had for the
(19:09):
blind in general. So he took a very extreme took
it pretty hard this definitely. 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,
a little bit um school was going to be over
(19:31):
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, but that didn't really work out either.
The family was too busy running the farm, doing their
everyday things that they did, and Um, they didn't have
(19:54):
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 a lifetime endowment for her to live at Perkins
(20:17):
as long as she wanted to, and 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. If you if you didn't have
neat stitches, she'd just make you rip the whole thing
out and start over. That's tough. But she'd also read
(20:39):
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 some
money to give to charity and buy presents for her
(20:59):
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 too strangers.
She did seem less friendly and less pleasant as she
(21:20):
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 got
sick with aery sypolis, which is a streptococcus infection, and
(21:44):
died May 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. So
bad first impression. But Keller's parents, who were dealing with
the same tantrums that Laura's family had dealt with years earlier,
(22:07):
happened to read Dickens forty two American Travels, where, if
you'll remember from the Dickens podcast, he wrote at length
about the then sensational 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 they were
(22:27):
connected with recent grad and Sullivan a good friend of
Laura's and someone who was familiar with How'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 to grade school yet exactly,
and Keller is so I guess I should say Bridgeman
(22:51):
is so closely connected with Keller because of that link
in her parents and Dickens and all of that. But
Keller did all is acknowledge Bridgeman's earlier education and its
effect on her own life. But Laurie's stories may be
best summed up with something that she said as a child,
when her teacher was explaining to her that while most
(23:12):
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, which she
(23:35):
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. Thank you so much
for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard
(23:56):
an email address or a Facebook you are l or
something similar over the course of today's episode, Since it
is from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I
Heart Radio app, and wherever else. You listen to podcasts.
(24:23):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. This classic is coming out during Deaf
History Month, which goes from March thirteenth to April fifteenth
each year. It's first Today commemorates the successful conclusion of
the Deaf President Now Protests, which we covered in a
previous episode of the show that has also been a
previous Saturday Classic, and then the last day of Deaf
(00:23):
History Month marks the establishment of the American School for
the Deaf, which was the first permanent school for the
deaf in the United States. So today we're sharing one
of our earlier episodes related to Deaf History, which is
on Laura Bridgeman. She was the first deaf blind person
in the US to receive a formal education, and she
also came up on our recent Saturday Classic on Charles Dickens.
(00:45):
In this episode, Sarah and Bablina talk about potential future
episodes on Helen Keller and Louis Brail, both of whom
are still on our ongoing list of topics. So enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
(01:11):
to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Delinea chalk reboarding,
and earlier this year, some interesting news came out of
Georgia Tech here in Atlanta. Researchers there announced that they'd
come 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
(01:32):
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
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
(01:56):
with visual disabilities in the past century. On today, we're
going to revisit a subject that we touched on 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 and writing and to be educated.
(02:16):
And she didn't use the now ubiquitous brail system that
we just talked about, which was only beginning at the time,
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,
(02:39):
their stories are really closely connected, aside from the fact
that young Helen Keller annoyed Bridgeman by stepping on her
foot when the two of them metum. But while Keller
really became a champion of disability rights and an international figure,
you know, somebody who's internationally famous, Bridgeman was on the
earlier end of the disability right story. And in fact,
(03:01):
when she started school in the eighteen thirties, people were
just starting to believe blind people could be educated. So
the idea of educating a deaf, blind person, this 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
(03:21):
to that story of her learning. Laura Dewey Bridgeman was
born December twenty one, eighty nine, near Hanover, New Hampshire.
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
(03:43):
chatty and seemed very smart. But at twenty four months
she and her two older sisters came down with scarlet fever.
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 eye, nearly blind,
and the other death and she had very little of
(04:03):
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
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
(04:23):
was still very smart. She was still displaying that interest
she had as a two year old in everything she
came across. She would touch everything she encountered. She had
cling to her mother and feel her arms in her
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
(04:44):
a workman on her family farm, Asa Tenney, 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 had a way
of sort of understanding what she was going through and
helped her perfect this basic sort of sign language. And
(05:06):
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
temper tantrums. She'd only obey her father, who would stomp
on the ground when he was upset with her. And
(05:28):
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
on Laura's ability to sign, and that got the attention
(05:48):
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
opened for students in eighteen thirty two with a mission um,
not just to educate blind children, that's kind of how
you'd see it today, but to really prove that blind
children could be educated and could become independent adults. Kids
(06:13):
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 Byron and fought in the Greek Revolution where Byron died.
He financially supported radical abolitionist John Brown, and he was
(06:37):
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
John Locke's idea of the tabula raza the blank slate,
and instead thought that the mind came with certain innate
(06:59):
for sility, 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. Clearly, he was very interested
in that. She was excellent pr for his school, and
she'd be a way for him to test his theories
(07:20):
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 eighty seven, when she was just
shy of eight years old. She just got a little
(07:41):
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 onerous two week period that she got he
(08:02):
started to teach her. He quickly decided to scrap the
basic sign language that she'd been using at home 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
(08:24):
separate the object from that label and she would have
to match them to each other. Yeah, 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
(08:44):
would put two and two together and realize it wasn't
just a matching game. These labels actually signified something about
the objects that they went with. But according to Jane
seymour Ford and Perkins, help leaved that her ability to
match really was just kind of a game. It was
just memorization. At this point, she liked getting approval, so
(09:06):
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, 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 describes
(09:28):
the aha sort of moment when she finally got this
that letters made up words, and words signified things, 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
(09:48):
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
she learned them 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
(10:09):
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
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
(10:30):
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.
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
(10:50):
capacity for grammar, since her later ability to understand all
these different complex tenses um kind of put her apart
from a lot of their deafline people who've learned language,
which to me just sounds like another way of saying inadability.
So maybe so we should also point out that while
Braill was by this point being used in some parts
of the world, Laura and the other students that Perkins
(11:13):
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 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
(11:34):
the next letter. And it was called square handwriting because
it has this very strange sort of square look to it.
You can, um, you can see letters that Laura herself wrote,
and it is a very unusual looking hand, but pretty remarkable.
It sounds really time consuming, it does, but apparently she
was a voracious letter writer, so she must have gotten
pretty fast at it. While she studied reading writing in
(11:57):
geography and algebra and geometry and all the their 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? 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.
(12:20):
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 how describes this sort
of girlish social butterfly behavior that Laura had um in
(12:40):
a passage I really liked, he said, quote When Laura
is walking through a passageway with her hands spread before her,
she notes instantly everyone she meets and passes them with
a sign of recognition. But if it be a girl
of her own age, and especially 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
(13:02):
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 important thing to mention,
because she does have a reputation being older as kind
of severe. But as a kid, she'd joke her on.
She'd purposely misspell words and then strike it out with
(13:25):
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 too, 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,
(13:47):
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 so
all her own clothes and had some things that almost
sound like amazing party tricks too. She could thread a
needle with her tongue. Um, just really cool talents that
(14:10):
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
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
(14:32):
made Laura so famous. She had hit students, sometimes shoved teachers.
She would get very upset with slow finger spellers too,
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,
(14:55):
she had four main teachers, Lydia Drew Morton, Eliza Rodgers,
Mary Swift Lambsome, and Sarah White Bond, and she stayed
lifelong friends with all of them. But when they leave
Perkins 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
(15:15):
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
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
(15:36):
watching her behind partitions which ray, it reminded me a
little of some of the Barnum episodes we've been talking about,
which this is around the same time, and um, I
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
(15:57):
known little girls would poke out their dolls eyes and
named them Laura. A very special kind of fame there, Yes,
but Laura also had kind of become How's adopted daughter
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
(16:18):
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
learning more about, and that was religion. So How had
(16:39):
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
intellectual educations were complete, at least to his idea, So
(17:02):
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 an innate understanding and love of God. That
was his hope. So his plan when he came back
from his honeymoon was to present her. You know, he
had a plan just like his labeling system. He would
(17:23):
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,
that there was something divine about these things, something divine
(17:45):
about the whole process. And also, according to Menan, 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
of education worked, he knew that she needed to have
(18:05):
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
going on. Yeah, knowing curious Laura by this point, you
(18:28):
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
from then on. When How finally came back, he was
(18:48):
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 or after this, and according to
menand he even said that her religious education was the
greatest disappointment of his life, and it caused him to
take back some of the praise he had for the
(19:09):
blind in general. So he took a very extreme took
it pretty hard this definitely. 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,
a little bit um school was going to be over
(19:31):
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, but that didn't really work out either.
The family was too busy running the farm, doing their
everyday things that they did, and Um, they didn't have
(19:54):
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 a lifetime endowment for her to live at Perkins
(20:17):
as long as she wanted to, and 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. If you if you didn't have
neat stitches, she'd just make you rip the whole thing
out and start over. That's tough. But she'd also read
(20:39):
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 some
money to give to charity and buy presents for her
(20:59):
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 too strangers.
She did seem less friendly and less pleasant as she
(21:20):
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 got
sick with aery sypolis, which is a streptococcus infection, and
(21:44):
died May 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. So
bad first impression. But Keller's parents, who were dealing with
the same tantrums that Laura's family had dealt with years earlier,
(22:07):
happened to read Dickens forty two American Travels, where, if
you'll remember from the Dickens podcast, he wrote at length
about the then sensational 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 they were
(22:27):
connected with recent grad and Sullivan a good friend of
Laura's and someone who was familiar with How'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 to grade school yet exactly,
and Keller is so I guess I should say Bridgeman
(22:51):
is so closely connected with Keller because of that link
in her parents and Dickens and all of that. But
Keller did all is acknowledge Bridgeman's earlier education and its
effect on her own life. But Laurie's stories may be
best summed up with something that she said as a child,
when her teacher was explaining to her that while most
(23:12):
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, which she
(23:35):
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. Thank you so much
for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard
(23:56):
an email address or a Facebook you are l or
something similar over the course of today's episode, Since it
is from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcast, the I
Heart Radio app, and wherever else. You listen to podcasts.
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