The invention of miracle.., p.3
The Invention of Miracles, page 3
Through high school, Aleck had been closer to his brother Edward, who was just one year younger, but now that he was finished with school, his work on the speaking machine would unite him and Melly in a single mission. In certain ways, Melly, who was two years older, was the opposite of Aleck. Where Aleck’s default was seriousness, Melly’s was playfulness and optimism. The Bells had a camera three decades before personal cameras would even begin to become common, and while other families of the 1850s and ’60s stood stoically still for their portraits, the Bells donned strange costumes—plaid pants, Turkish hats, suits five sizes too big—and they played. Melly and his father were kings of exaggerated expressions: faces crushed in anguish, eyes comically wide in surprise. In one double-exposed image, Melly appears as a ghost, a sheet thrown over his body, while the rest of the family cowers playfully in horror.
By contrast, Aleck’s young face was characterized by the vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows, by a look like he’s squinting forever against the sunlight, lost in thought. In one photo, he has Melly’s jaw yanked open, and is peering seriously into his brother’s mouth, as if to see how it works.
In all things, Aleck learned through real experiences—both those that were successful and those that were traumatizing. On his best days, he learned from his failures, but normally he learned through pure enthusiasm. He always preferred open skies to classrooms, fumbling his way through his formal education. He loved to climb Corstorphine Hill behind his Edinburgh home, and wrote poetry about birds and weather, collected stones and plants and bones.
At the encouragement of his father, he had learned to classify plants by the Linnaean system, looking each plant up in a guidebook and identifying them with a long Latin name. Aleck had never received good marks in Latin, though; it was one of those subjects that drove him away from school. Monandria, diandria, triandria. He loved the world but hated Latin. It ruined botany. Instead, he turned to the body.
When his father gave him the corpse of a suckling pig, Aleck called for a special meeting of the “Society for the Promotion of Fine Arts Among Boys,” a small club he’d started. Aleck invited the members up into the attic of 13 South Charlotte Street, which was Aleck’s domain, where he collected his bones and plants and river rocks, where he laid them out in a system he supposed was scientific. The crowning piece of his collection was a human skull, another gift from his father, which kept his horrified mother at bay.
In the attic, Aleck set up boards for the young officers to sit on, and a table on which he laid the pig’s body. He, the “anatomy professor,” stood behind it prepared for his first lecture before his first audience, but when he brought the knife down into the abdomen, the body groaned a gassy exhale, loud enough to sound like a last gasp of life.
Aleck stood at the table, the knife in his hand, shocked. A moment later, he led the tumbling escape from the attic and down the stairs. The other boys ran until they reached their respective homes. And Aleck—no matter what coaxing, what reassurances that the pig was not alive, that he did not kill the pig—Aleck wouldn’t return to the attic.
His father retrieved the corpse and disposed of it.
Despite such failures, Aleck still learned best through trials and seekings and problems, through mistakes and accidents, pounding questions that evaded every attempt at an answer, truths within truths that only experience could unearth, for better or worse.
* * *
The work on the speaking machine was coming along more haltingly than Aleck had expected. He and Melly were stuck and out of patience, but their father emphasized the importance of perseverance, of not turning away in the face of defeat. He reminded his sons of the resources at their disposal, directing them back to the book Wheatstone had lent them, to look into what it was that made voice.
As an elocutionist, Melville’s work was to correct the speech of others. It was the family business: Melville’s brother, David Bell, and father, Alexander Bell, were also famous elocutionists, engaged in the work of speech pathology. They worked with actors and preachers, immigrants and stutterers, to smooth out error and give power to the voice. George Bernard Shaw would draw inspiration from them for the character of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, later remade as My Fair Lady. They helped spread the idea that not only could speech be corrected, people could also be transformed by it.
Melville saw the unique alphabet he was developing as an extension of his work as an elocutionist and also as a technological breakthrough that would be able to reach much further. Unlike alphabets before his, which largely drew their logic from the sounds of particular languages, Melville sought to shape his alphabet around any sounds that the voice was capable of making. By doing this, he believed, he could “convert the unlettered millions in all countries into readers,” and pave “linguistic highways between nations.”
It could allow for quick literacy in a language someone already knew, and though it couldn’t teach people the meanings of words or word order in different languages, it could greatly cut down on how much time it took for people to pronounce different words correctly, as well as to read and write those words. But even without knowledge of a given language, a universal alphabet was of particular use to the British Empire in the age of missionary trips: it allowed an English-speaking missionary to read the Bible in any language needed—they would not have to know the language, only how to pronounce the words, and the Bible’s teachings could reach the ears of anyone they sought to save. He understood his alphabet to be representative of something of the greatest importance: the human voice, which itself represented personhood.
The mid-nineteenth century was still ruled by the centuries-long notion that the very essence of being was embodied by speech. Voice was where language and thought met. This idea, often credited to Aristotle, had begun to meet with more biblical thinking, threading God’s reflection and intention through these ancient ideas. Melville’s own father wrote that “in no higher respect has man been created in the image of his Maker, than in his adaption for speech and the communication of his ideas. The Almighty fiat ‘Let there be light,’ was not more wonderful in its results, than the Creator’s endowing the clay, which he had taken from the ground, with the faculty of speech.”
Philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, in the late eighteenth century, argued that while all animals made sounds, it was humans who brought these sounds together into repeatable units—and in doing so, it was humans who learned to think. “The delicate organs of speech, therefore,” wrote Herder, “must be considered as the rudder of reason, and speech as the heavenly spark, that gradually kindles our thoughts and senses to a flame.” He believed that thought began with voice; our very humanity began with speech. To speak—and speak well—was to be able to think, to be human in the holiest, most complete form.
At the time, these beliefs were also held in their inverse: to be unable to speak was to be not quite human. Groups that did not speak, or did not speak well—immigrants, the developmentally disabled, the deaf, the poor—were often the groups who had the least access to rights. Their lack of voice had led many to deny their full humanity. In ancient Greece and Rome, infanticide of a deaf child was allowed; Jewish tradition granted deaf people neither the rights of adults nor the liability to adult punishment; Christianity often held that they could not be confirmed nor married. They were casually referred to as animals or savages.
Melville wasn’t using those words, and he didn’t believe in the extremes that those ideas represented. Instead, his goal was to use his alphabet to increase access to language and thus to increase access to one another. He was thinking of the many languages and cultures that were coming together under the British Empire—which within the past fifty years had slowly continued to spread to include countries as different as Yemen, Pakistan, Burma, Fiji, and Hong Kong. He was aware of the many conflicts stemming from a persistent inability to communicate. He wanted his alphabet to be a gift to the world, and though he could give lessons and lectures, he would charge nothing for the alphabet itself. He saw his alphabet as “one of the foremost Arts of Peace.” He hoped the British government would cover the cost of the special typeface that was needed so he could actualize this gift.
Melville called his alphabet Visible Speech, because it acted as an instructional guide on how to shape the mouth into different sounds. Each symbol was part of a code of where to put the tongue in the mouth, how to breathe, how open the lips should be. When he was finished, Melville hoped, his alphabet would have the malleability to be used by any language, allowing anyone to participate in the power granted by proper speech.
It was because of his alphabet that he had been curious about Wheatstone’s machine, though that machine echoed for him another he’d seen almost two decades earlier, in 1846: Joseph Faber’s “Euphonia.” Faber was an inventor who’d modeled his speaking machine after the human lungs, larynx, and mouth, placing his device within a fake torso and giving it the head of an automaton. But the effect of Euphonia’s voice, which Faber operated via keyboard, was so monotonous and hollow that one viewer said that it resembled less a human than a half human, “bound to speak slowly when tormented by the unseen power outside.” Faber’s invention became a mockery and faded away.
But for Melville, the importance of both machines was that they showed how the human voice was, in many respects, a machine. If the voice could be replicated, then it could be controlled. If it could be controlled, it could be documented with precision and taught with precision. It could fall into the larger movement to find a universal alphabet, a movement that had been around for over a century. All of this was central to the success of Visible Speech.
* * *
While Melville was working on stoking Aleck’s interest in speech, his mother, Eliza, exerted a gentler influence, training her son’s abilities in attention to sensory detail. She was a pianist who had begun to go deaf in late childhood, and her deafness had only increased with age. Now she rested the ivory mouthpiece of her hearing tube on the soundboard of their piano; she tilted her head to listen. To some extent, Eliza could still hear the instrument’s resonant notes, but more so, she could feel them.
Before Melville had started his efforts to recalibrate Aleck’s career path onto the family profession of elocution, Aleck had wanted to play piano. As a boy, his true love was not speech—not machines or alphabets—but music. When Eliza had taught him to play, he took to the piano full of attention and vigor. He trained his ear along the notes, the vibrations of those wires strung taut. He learned the modulations of sound, could feel and hear them in their tiniest differentiations, their dissonances and synchronicities. He could play by ear a tune he’d heard only twice.
Eliza was also an artist who sketched landscapes and ruins and rivers whenever the family went on vacation. She and Melville had met through a mutual friend, back when she was a miniature painter, painting the smallest features onto the tiniest beings. And this delicate ability was counterbalanced with strength. She was a “splendid walker,” Melville said, and would walk with him for fifteen miles a day, eight days straight.
Melville had fallen in love with her quickly. She was not considered a beauty, with her strong nose, prominent chin, and gaunt cheeks, and she was ten years older than Melville besides. But Melville didn’t see it that way—he thought she was thin and pretty and had “the sweetest expression I think I ever saw.” At first he was filled with pity for her deafness, but he couldn’t pity her once he knew her. She was well-read and widely informed. She learned the British Sign Language alphabet, but she used it only to communicate with her family. She didn’t have deaf friends. He found it “philosophical” the way she saw her hearing tube as a filter, “through which nothing passed that was not worth listening to!”
As they fell for each other, they rambled through the highlands of Scotland together, bringing whiskey wherever they went, including into temperance lodgings. One day, Melville saw so many fish in the water that he decided to buy a rod and gear and try his hand at catching some. But the clear water that allowed Melville to see the fish went both ways. The fish “could see through it all,” wrote Eliza, “and did not even require to go near his apparatus to discover the deceit.” Giving up, Melville went into the water himself, as Eliza watched on, sketching.
For Eliza, sketching was both a hobby and a mode of close attention. She believed that those with poor sight or poor hearing actually observed more than others—“only, in a different way.” Their thoughts were simply, she thought, “turned within,” and they were more likely to keep their observations to themselves. She believed something similar was true of children: “The youth makes many observations which escape the man, merely because the latter esteems them to be not worth his notice.” So Eliza taught Aleck to see with thoroughness and precision, to observe what others might ignore.
And Eliza herself was an important model. The way she lived her life flew in the face of ideas that the deaf were, at best, objects of charity, and at worst, weights on society. Instead, she taught him that a deaf person could think and observe with depth and clarity, and, too, that they could have voice. Eliza, though deaf, still spoke. She’d lost her hearing after an illness when she was eleven, long after she’d learned to speak, and so she simply continued speaking. She could rarely understand the speech of others without her hearing tube, but she could make her own voice heard. Socially this put her at a remove from congenitally deaf people, and those who lost their hearing before the age of four or so. It meant she’d had command of language and speech before her hearing began to fade. It also meant that she was able to impress upon people that she retained the ability to think in abstractions, at a time when the signing deaf were believed to only grasp the most concrete of ideas.
Being able to speak, to express language in this way, meant it was easier for Eliza to go through her days as a deaf woman. She knew almost nothing about the world of the deaf—nothing of sign language or deaf schools or deaf communities—and she slipped, with relative ease, into the world of the hearing.
Still, Aleck learned the British Sign Language alphabet to act as a makeshift interpreter when he and his mother were in public. This wasn’t the same as the grammatical system of British Sign Language, some version of which had been in use for centuries already and likely beginning to standardize in the eighteenth century. Instead, this was a sign-based alphabet that could be grafted onto English. Out of the line of sight of others—below a table, or off to the side—Aleck would spell out what his mother needed to understand. When Eliza needed it most, when she really needed to grasp what had happened, or what someone had said, she could always rely on Aleck.
In public they stuck with finger spelling, but at home, Aleck would bow down near his mother’s face, send his breath against her cheek. He had trained his voice to speak in a soft, deep resonance that her ears could still hear. The effort she put into these processes would have been unrelenting, but it must have seemed to Aleck then that all manner of things were possible, if only with enough patience, enough care. Eliza asked questions and, like no one else could, Aleck answered.
In the evenings, the home filled with Eliza’s playing. She could close her eyes, feel the vibrations of the music on her rib cage and in the floorboards, let the sounds give what they could. Melville had once remarked that she “played the Scottish melodies with such expression that you seemed to hear the words.” If Aleck could play the body with the precision that his mother played those notes, he could marry what his heart desired, to be a musician, with what his father increasingly wanted for him: a career in speech. And so Aleck began to listen for the music inside the human voice, in its perfections.
* * *
To learn about voice one must first become conscious of breathing. Before voice is anything else—before it beckons, declares, declaims, before it whispers or whimpers or cries or sings—voice is breath. The lungs fill with air, and then on the exhale the diaphragm pushes the air up and out from the lungs. Only then can a spoken word form.
Wheatstone’s speaking machine offered breath, an exhale as the operator’s elbow pushed down the handle of the bellows, breathing into the wind box; an inhale as a counterweight filled the bellows again with air.
Aleck had initially wanted his creation to be more human, to have a face and a nose, eyes and hair. But when these extra parts prevented Aleck and Melly from getting the basics right—the breath, the throat, the mouth—Melville talked them out of building a face. The brothers began focusing only on the mechanics. They considered Wheatstone’s bellow-based lungs, but ultimately they gave up on the idea. The simplest thing was for the lungs of the machine to be their own lungs; they’d create a machine that they could blow into like a trumpet.
That settled, Melly refocused on the larynx—the voice box—its vocal cords producing volume and pitch. He made and remade it, unsatisfied. Finally he landed on a tin tube with a lid on one end and a one-inch slit through the lid, and then a piece of rubber stretched over the lid. The rubber, too, had a slit in it, aligning with the slit in the tin. When Melly blew through the mouthpiece, it made a sound, but it still wasn’t right. He added another piece of rubber, staggered their slits, and produced something that he could imagine as voice. To Aleck it sounded like a toy horn, one they might blow boisterously to celebrate some holiday or another. He accepted it; he knew that the larynx wasn’t really where the voice was fine-tuned.
Voice is vibration, and that vibration is shaped in the mouth. The lowest hum vibrates in the cheeks, in the teeth. Aleck still needed to make the tongue, this most complicated part of speech mechanics. Its movements seemed infinite in comparison to the quiet lever of the jaw, or the soft palate’s rise and fall. He replicated the tongue with six adjacent cushioned planes of wood, each one able to move independently to create consonants and vowels. If he rigged them up to piano keys, he would be able to play this tongue: curl it to the teeth as for the letter L, flatten it to the bottom to sing a long A.
