Taken on June 21, 1871, this historic photograph captures Alexander Graham Bell at the peak of the steps of Boston’s Pemberton Square School for the Deaf. He arrived fresh from Canada to introduce Visible Speech, a specialized system of phonetic symbols developed by his father to visually demonstrate how to form vocal sounds.
Before inventing the telephone, Bell was a passionate, dedicated educator of the deaf whose methods sparked intense debate across the country. Surrounded by pioneering educators like Sarah Fuller, Bell used this platform to heavily champion oralism the practice of teaching deaf students to speak out loud and lip-read rather than use sign language. While this oralist movement would become deeply controversial in later years for suppressing signing culture, this specific photograph captures the exact moment speech-based instruction aggressively took hold in American deaf schools.
Image via Wikipedia Commons, public domain in the US
