Summary of Katie Booth's The Invention of Miracles

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 In 1863, at age sixteen, Alexander Graham Bell first started work on his speaking machine. He planned to give the contraption a human form, and then to play this mechanical body like an organ, with keys that depressed the different portions of the tongue and lips.
#2 Aleck was very close with his brother, Edward, who was just one year younger. But after finishing school, their work on the speaking machine would bring them together as a single team.
#3 Melville and his brother were famous elocutionists, who helped smooth out error and give power to the voice. They worked with actors and preachers, immigrants and stutterers, to correct their speech and give power to their voices.
#4 The midnineteenth century was still ruled by the centurieslong notion that the essence of being was embodied by speech. Voice was where language and thought met. Melville’s goal was to increase access to language and thus to increase access to one another.

Sujets

• Sociology
• Général

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781669374732
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Katie Booth's The Invention of Miracles
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

In 1863, at age sixteen, Alexander Graham Bell first started work on his speaking machine. He planned to give the contraption a human form, and then to play this mechanical body like an organ, with keys that depressed the different portions of the tongue and lips.

#2

Aleck was very close with his brother, Edward, who was just one year younger. But after finishing school, their work on the speaking machine would bring them together as a single team.

#3

Melville and his brother were famous elocutionists, who helped smooth out error and give power to the voice. They worked with actors and preachers, immigrants and stutterers, to correct their speech and give power to their voices.

#4

The mid-nineteenth century was still ruled by the centuries-long notion that the essence of being was embodied by speech. Voice was where language and thought met. Melville’s goal was to increase access to language and thus to increase access to one another.

#5

Melville’s mother, Eliza, was a pianist who had begun to go deaf in late childhood. She trained her son’s attention to sensory detail, and he fell in love with her.

#6

Eliza taught her son to see with depth and clarity, and to observe what others might ignore. She was a deaf woman who had command of language and speech before her hearing began to fade.

#7

The brothers began to focus on the mechanics of the voice, and they created a speaking machine that they could blow into like a trumpet. It produced a sound, but it still wasn’t right. They added another piece of rubber and produced something that they could imagine as voice.

#8

The boys created a machine that could cry out a continuous vowel ah. It was a beginning. They used it to play tricks, and their downstairs neighbors grew concerned about the baby. Aleck began to dream of escaping, taking off to Leith under the cover of night to steal away on a ship.

#9

Melville’s career as a teacher began in Elgin, and he spent his free time exploring the hills around Covesea, a nearby seaside town. He had his own money, his own time, and his own plans.

#10

The Bells’ performance was a success, and they began to perform before small groups of potential funders. They never revealed what the various symbols meant or how to read them, but they were still able to convince people of things they believed were impossible.

#11

From his father, he learned which parts of the mouth and throat controlled which sounds, how to read those sounds from an obscure alphabet, and how to give speech the power to shock and astound.

#12

In 1862, a six-year-old girl named Mabel Hubbard boarded a train from Boston to New York City to visit P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. She had a fever, and her parents brought her to the carriage. She was the most gentle, docile, and loving little sufferer you ever saw.

#13

After Mabel’s illness, the streets around Grace Church were mobbed for the wedding of Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren. Inside the church, when the wedding party took to the aisle, nearly a thousand guests strained their necks and inhaled small, delighted gasps.

#14

Mabel had deaf cousins on her mother’s side, and though little is known of them and the families weren’t close, Gertrude knew something of deafness. She and Gardiner took Mabel to the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut, where they learned that Mabel would lose her voice in three months.

#15

The typical origin story of the American deaf, which is the deaf as a people, begins with the American Asylum, which was founded in 1814 by a young minister named Thomas Gallaudet and an eight-year-old deaf girl named Alice Cogswell.

#16

Before this, deaf culture was more diffuse, and there was no agreed-upon system of values or stories through which those values were disseminated. Many deaf children, especially if they were born to hearing families, lived in isolation.

#17

When Gardiner visited the American Asylum, he saw a people apart, and he didn’t like it. He wanted his daughter to be able to exist in the hearing world, and he thought that her voice would help her do that.

#18

Mabel’s deafness fundamentally changed the way her parents saw the future with her. They had always envisioned a life for Mabel where she would be able to hear, but now they had to imagine a life where she could speak.

#19

Gertrude read about the German school for the deaf, which was able to communicate with non-deaf people by signing, and she was excited about the possibility of Mabel being able to speak.

#20

Laura Bridgman was a DeafBlind girl who was taught to read and write by Howe. She was the perfect example of how people could be transformed and become productive members of society.

#21

Gertrude began speaking with her daughter, Mabel, and she began to realize that her daughter was still alive and could think. She began to believe that her daughter could be saved.

#22

Mabel’s lessons began at home. If she wanted a glass of milk, she couldn’t just point to the silver pitcher. She had to say, I want a drink of milk. She began to speak.

#23

Mabel’s first teacher, Miss True, was a new kind of teacher for the deaf. She was gentle but firm, smart but willing to take instruction. She didn’t care much about the miracle of speech, but rather the acquisition of knowledge.

#24

The American Asylum, a pro–sign language group, put forward several representatives to explain their perspective. They argued that the education of the deaf should achieve two things: an ability to communicate with the world at large, and a stimulation of intellect.