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~~~~  This is Page 2 ~~~~

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  The Greatest Strikeout in Baseball History

 In the 1926 World Series, one game hung by a thread with bases loaded and two outs.  The Yankees needed two runs to win.  A great Yankee slugger was at bat and it looked like a grand slam was coming.

The Cardinals pitcher  (photo) facing him was an alcoholic, partly drunk from a binge the night before, overaged  at 51, epileptic, double-visioned, and quite deaf from shell shock and mustard gas when a WW1 veteran.    

Mighty Casey (the great slugger Tony Lazzeri) was struck out by
​Grover Cleveland Alexander.                               
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Columbus Was Deaf !

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This 19th Century portrait of Columbus by Thomas John Guillick shows Columbus about to say, "Huh?  Whaddya say?  Please write it for me.  I can't lipread people with beards."

There are 71 known portraits of him, but he never sat for any.  They
 were based only on what was known of him, and this one proves that our poor Christopher might have been helped by a cochlear implant.
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   "I have ears for the deaf, and I know what the dumb man says".
-----Response of the Oracle at Delphi to Croesus of  Lydia who questioned her power (per Herodotus, 550 BC).
​         

BTW, Herodotus recorded that King Croesus had two sons, one hearing, one deaf.  Only the hearing son was named.   The nameless other son is the first deaf individual mentioned in recorded history.  

The honor of being the first named, was acquired over 500 years later by a deaf Roman boy, Quintus Pedius.  He's also the first named deaf person to prove Aristotle's judgement of deaf people less than sterling.  You'll find our boy on our Page 8.

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God ordered Moses to tell his people:  Though shalt not curse the deaf, nor lay a stumbling block before the the blind .   Levictus, 19:14.     Watch out!  It's in the Torah too.
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   "That poor deaf pianist........."

This comment in a German newspaper review, referred to the much too soft music, at points almost unintentionally silent,  in a solo performance by a young virtuoso pianist named Ludwig von Beethoven.   


                                   
With his hearing declining and critics making fun of him, he gave up piano playing and went totally into composing.  (He had always been a composer, publishing his first musical composition before he was 12 years old).  

His greatest work is his immortal Ninth Symphony, created while totally deaf.  At its first public performance, he sat on the stage, back to the audience, to provide tempo cues to the conductor.  At the end, he was completely unaware of the audience rising to a loud, standing ovation.  Then someone on stage turned his chair around.
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Beethoven's deafness was progressive.  It was variously thought to be from typhus, otosclerosis, or syphilis.  At that time, syphilis was a basket term for unknown causes of many disorders.  Some have added neurotoxic poisoning from the lead drinking vessels of that time.  He was quite a drinker.  Also from heavy metal ingredients in oral medicines doctors gave him for his deafness.
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Here's another.............

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It is not so well known that another composer never heard the best of his creations.  My Native Land,  Sea Song,  The Kiss,  The Secret,  My Star,  Sunset, The River Moldau, and  Woods and Fields of Bohemia---were all  masterpieces by the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana (d. 1884).  They were created in his last ten years of almost total neurotoxic deafness.  He also suffered from severe tinnitus, and he included some tinnitus sounds in at least one of his works.  He composed to the end of his life, even as he descended into madness.

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........and another​..............

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Gabriel Faure (d. 1924) specialized in chamber music. His works are at the top of French musical tradition.  A small, but very important part of his work was created after his deafness later in life. 

His deafness affected his music of that period, when it turned forceful and seemingly angry. (See a parallel with the artist Goya, Page 15).   ________________________________________

............and three more.

William Boyce, Ignaz Holzbauer, and  Ralph Williams  (L to R) were composers who continued their work after profound deafness later in life.  You can read about them here:

https://www.cmuse.org/famous-composers-who-suffered-from-deafness/
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Meet Bartolommeo Eustacheo (d. 1574)

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​This elegantly-clothed gentleman in the 10th Century, was the first to deeply explore the Eustachian tube, of great importance in hearing.

​ It is named in his honor. 
A remarkable article on this can be read here:

http://jaivirdi.com/2012/07/23/a-brief-history-of-the-eustachian-tube/



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      He was also the first to accurately record the structure of the cochlea.  He researched and recorded an amazing number of other parts of the anatomy.   His work remained unpublished for well over 100 years, due to opposition of the Church to human dissection. 
Arrow points to the Eustachian Tube.
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According to James T. Rogers, an authority on proverbs and cliches, the earliest written evidence of  the phrase "fall on deaf ears", appeared over 500 years ago ---  in the 1440 book, Scala Perfeccionis, by Walter Hylton, a religious academic.
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     The first affirmative-action
   employment program

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Henry Ford launched the first affirmative action employment program in 1914.  He hired hundreds of epileptics, amputees, and people deaf, blind, and with other disabilities----  plus ex-convicts straight out of jail. 
Most of these people were unemployable elsewhere on almost any level at the time.  They were reasonably paid and well utilized.                           
                                    Source:  Ford biographer James R. Cook
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         Deaf people talk only to each other?

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Back in the 1920's, Archer M. Huntington founded the Museum of the Hispanic Society of  America (in New York City, the largest outside of Spain).  He hired only Deaf workers for its library.  He did that to safeguard the library's operational secrets, thinking signers never communicate with hearing people.  Most workers came from Fanwood (N.Y. School for the Deaf). You can still see the table at the museum with a paper roll dispenser.  It was used to write notes to the Deaf employees.
(Much of the above is from Art News, Sept.'98, as told by a former Curator at the museum). 

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"She ....... ( censored XXX).......  and  
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was the best ( censored XXX) I ever had".


Henry Miller in Tropic of Capricorn (1938), on accidentally entering the bedroom of a strange Deaf woman in New York City.

Miller's novels were heavy with sexual escapades.  One of them from the 1930's was banned here as obscene, all the way to 1964.
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Sourd ("deaf" in French) is not an uncommon surname name in France, obviously originating with a deaf ancestor.  A heroic carrier is Colonel Jean Bapiste Sourd.  Right after his arm was amputated on the field at Waterloo, he went straight back into the battle.
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"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions nobody asked them."
                                        Leo Tolstoy

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Meet Malta the Dog .......................... 
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A deaf reader had this temperamental little Lhasa Apso named Malta (breed shown at left).  When annoyed or angry, she barked loudly at his hearing wife.
But at him she "barked" silently------ using only strong head shakes and grimaces.
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And she usually got his attention with a special tug of his pants cuff.


If she was home  with just one of them, and that one was napping, she often felt ignored.  She would sometimes wake the wife with sharp barks.  If it was the husband, he got only the silent treatment ----nuzzled and walked over. 

When the doorbell rang, she raced over only to him.  When the phone rang, she ignored him,  knowing only the wife answered the phone. (That stopped after he acquired a TTY and light signals).

Malta recognized the deafness and ways to cope with it during puppyhood, a perception that escapes quite a few adult hearing humans. 

                                  ~~~~~~
 ...............  and Puddles the Cat                       

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We heard of a  cat,  Puddles.  This is from back when many d/Deaf people used TTYs (telephoning typewriters).  Her owner acquired a classy  $500 TTY and used it prolifically.  Puddles was deeply envious of the attention it got. You know what's said about a woman scorned. She made her feelings known by urinating on it, which damaged the circuitry.  As the warranty didn't cover that, he had to buy another and keep it well out of her reach. 
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We​
 read in a hunting magazine, that the incredible hearing of a doe can probably tell the species of a leaf solely by the sound of its fall.   Does can focus their ears, which are bigger than their heads.  They keep watch  for the herd.  When a hunter enters a forest, they know it right away, because human footsteps are not native to forest sounds.  If a group of hunters, say three, are unknowingly walking in step, they might as well have a brass band with them. 
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Here's a remarkable dog cartoon video by a German student, related to disability.  No captions as none are needed.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0zJoYNS6XHU

Update June, 2018:  Sorry, some YouTube clod deleted the video.
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All typists sometimes mistakenly bring up "dead" instead of "deaf", because D and F are keyboard neighbors.   In English, "dead" and "deaf" are one letter apart.  This happens in only one other language, Yiddish in Latin characters:   "toyt" is dead, and "toyb" is  deaf.​ _____________________________________________________

​​Four Greats With Deaf Wives
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          A.G. Bell              T.H. Gallaudet                     Augustin                                                                                            St. Gaudens
A.G. Bell, Samuel F.B. Morse, and Rev. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet married deaf women.  The wives of Bell and Gallaudet were their former students.  The great American sculptor, Augustin St. Gaudens, married a hard-of-hearing girl (Augusta) who later become deaf.

Morse, inventor of the telegraph and Morse Code, married his second wife, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold.  She was a native signer with Deaf speech, and a graduate of The New York Institute for the Deaf.   She was 26 and he 57. 

He married her because (aside from her beauty and amity), "her misfortune of not hearing and her defective speech .........  excited the more my love and pity for her".  He believed that her deafness would make her dependent on him, and thus deeply devoted and affectionate. Despite this odd paternalism, the marriage was assumably a happy one, producing four children.  (Some of this comes from historian Jill Lepore).

We read in Wiki.Answers.com (with no source provided) that he developed his Morse Code exclusively to communicate with Sarah via table tapping  ----tap for dot and tap-tap for dash (as if the telegraph came as an afterthought).  We doubt that.  They may have played with the code, but actually Morse became semi-functional in ASL.             

                    Sarah Elizabeth and Samuel F. B. Morse
      
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One man who became deaf, dreamed of many ears of corn---  
"because corn grows on ears",  he said. 
                                                                          Flair Annual, 1953

BTW, the Flair Annual of 1953 won our 2012 Golden Ear of Corn Award for much more of such nonsense.  See next page.
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He Spoke to Their Toes?

Early in the 19th Century, a French physician, a Dr. Petetin, published his  Memoire sur la Catalepsie   ----his observations of cataleptics  (schizophrenics in motionless stupor).  They were deaf in their ears while in stupor, but  reacted to speech only as if their ears were on their feet, hands, or stomachs.

(That rings a bell.  We recall reading somewhere that elephants can hear bass tones through the soles of their feet, as if they had etxra ears down there.  This informs them of disturbances in the ground from nearby other animals, unseen by the elephants.). 
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Volta's Dumbass Experiment

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 The first  to create electrically stimulated sound inside the head, was not Drs. Djourno, Eynes, or House, the Cochlear Implant pioneers.   It is said to be the Italian Count Allesandro Volta (d. 1827),  at left, before those three were born.  He invented the electric battery (though nature beat him to it with the electric eel ) and the "volt" is named in his honor. 

Near the end of the 18th century, in a seemingly brainless experiment, he pumped
a whopping 50 volts DC into his ears.  He used metal rods pressed to his eardrums  ---rods tipped with cotton moistened with salt water for connectivity.     Anything up to electrocution could have occurred. Purpose?  Who knows, maybe he expected his eyes to light up.  He heard sound he described as "like sizzling soup". 

We regret raining on his parade, but we believe all he heard was  the crackling sounds of poor electrical contact between his eardrums and the damp, salted cotton.  The electricity itself generated nothing inside his head.


The honor actually belongs to two English-Indian surgeons 
(Baz Da Rana and Sonesh Dee).   See Page 8.
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The Volta Review, has been around for over 100 years.  It focuses on scientific activities related to deafness, speech, and language.  Volta didn't have much to do with those things, so how did his name get there?
France awarded A.G.Bell the Volta Prize for achievements in electro-physics.  Bell used the honor to create his "Volta Laboratory", which eventually became the A.G. Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.  Thus, Volta's name got a push towards deafness.
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Saved by Fake Deaf-Mutism

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We read this in "Is Paris Burning?", the book on Hitler's planned destruction of Paris in WW2.  An American B26 pilot, shot down over Paris, was hidden by the French Resistance. He was moved within the city disguised as a workman. But he had blonde hair and blue eyes, a square-jaw, and a 6 ft. 3 in. frame----an all-American look, a very unusual appearance there.  

A German officer noticed him, was curious, and approached him with a question in French (which he wouldn't have understood).  A 7-year old boy with the American's guides, was quickly sent to the German to say, "My father is deaf and dumb". (It was probably well-rehearsed for such an occasion). The German officer walked away.


                    ~~~~~~

More like that.  A British fighter pilot blown out of his craft and severely injured, was hidden by the underground with a French farmer.  This happened on D-Day near Caen.   Gestapo agents were billeted at the same farm. The pilot, dressed in farm clothes, was described to them as a local deaf mute who was injured when his house was bombed.  He was ignored by the Germans.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/68909077
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A Deaf Man Invented the Swing Mirror

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The swing mirror on bikes and cars was invented by a deaf English cyclist and journalist, 
Arthur Faed Wilson (d. 1945).  His middle name (pronounced "feed") is an add-on name, "deaf" spelled backwards. He was also the first Deaf person in Great Britain to own and drive a car.

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​Meet the Deaf Kid Who Forced the Mighty US Mint to Redesign the United States Nickel !!

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The new 1883 five cents nickel had Lady Liberty on front and Roman 5 (“V”) on reverse.  But it didn’t say “CENTS”. Everyone was supposed to know it was just a nickel, since it had the silver-grey color of today's nickel.

A young Deaf and mute genius-of-sorts named Joshua Tatum gave lots of these nickels a cheap, extremely thin gold plate, after machine-milling (fluting or slotting) the edges   -----a simple hand machine operation.
That made them resemble the same-sized $5 gold coin of that time ($5 then was like $135 today). That is, he counterfeited each 5 cents into 5 dollars.  He raked in lots of money until caught.  This forced the US Mint to redesign their dies to add “CENTS” to the coin ​-----a complicated and expensive task.

​He counterfeited lots of them.  You can buy one of Joshua's fakes on eBay (or from a coin dealer).  It's called "the Racketeer Nickel".  Some dealers may become fakers themselves, by gold plating the original nickel, forgetting the edge milling,  and not disclosing it's just a copy.

The Racketeer Nickel is well-known in the numismatic industry, but the fact that the racketeer himself was a Deaf kid, is rarely mentioned.

Muteness (and a very good lawyer) got Joshua acquitted of any crime -----something you might find quite funny, as we did. ​ Read about it here.
http://www.pcgs.com/News/The-Man-Who-Could-Stop-The-Mint 
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Meet Mr. Anybody

The model in that Acousticon advertisement down on the right, missing front tooth and all, looks like the cheese counter guy in the supermarket, or the shoe store clerk (without the collar and bow tie).

​There was a reason not to use a young, good looking model, such as in the Beltone, Auris, and most other ads.  There was much resistance to hearing aids back then.   The message here is that it's  suitable for every 
Mr (or Ms or Mrs)........ for anybody with a hearing loss, not just those young, attractive  models who most people don't identify with.

​This may be the first time an "anybody" was used in advertising for this purpose.

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THE REST OF THIS
COLUMN  IS 
CLOSED
​              FOR                     CONSTRUCTION


WE REGRET THE JACKHAMMER VIBRATIONS

DIRECT ANY COMPLAINTS TO:
                   TheBrainyDeafSite@Yahoo.com

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 Oh, BTW....... that guy above has plugs jammed into his ears .  The tremendous noise of the pneumatic hammer is around 120 dB.  That can quickly damage his hearing without the plugs.  
​
Well......
…….the New England Journal of Medicine reported that a mother was temporarily deafened in one ear by the scream of her 11-month old infant.  The doctor ** on her case had an engineer measure the kid's scream at 6 inches from its mouth.    
It was a whopping 117 dB, the same as the pneumatic hammer. 
   
**Bruce Bostrum, MD,  University of Minnesota
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                                        UP TO NEXT COLUMN, PLEASE



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1. Who is this strange-looking guy?                    Six hints:  
He's not Adolf Hitler or Charlie Chaplin.
​He's Deaf.
He wears a swastika armband.
He has a toothbrush mustache.
He carries a gun.
​
Meet him (if you care to) on Page 6.​

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2. Which very famous deaf genius had all his ear bones stolen from his corpse to be kept as souvenirs?      [See Page 13].

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3.  What does the term "deaf and dumb" have in common with the cartoon character, Wonder Woman ?  ​[See Page 7].

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  4.  Three Queens of England had held the powerful title, ​"The Empress of India".  
​One was Victoria; the other was Mary.  Who was the deaf one in between?  She was considered the most beautiful queen of England.
         ​ 
[See Page 12].

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5. Which famous scientist warned that an evil and harmful force radiated from deaf, blind, and similarly disabled people?  [See Page 8].

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6. Which famous deaf genius is said to be "the most influential person of the last thousand years"?  
(OMG !!  That beats Einstein, Marx, and Freud).
​ Hint:  As a deaf kid, he got taken out of grade school for having an empty head.  [See Page 11].

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7. "The Deaf and Dumb State of the United States" or "The Deaf and Dumb Republic"  had been proposed.  
​It was also referred to as "Deaf Mutia", "Eyeth",  and "Gestoria".  
​Where was it to be located?  [See Page 14].

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8. What is said to be the worst movie of all time, from a deaf viewpoint?   In another film, who was the evil Deaf servant who later became a big name star?  ​[See Page 3].

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 9. Two characters in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, are deaf.  One is the hunchback himself, who was deafened by the bells.  Who is the other?  [See Page 12]

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 10. The body of a famous deaf genius was disinterred.  A planned autopsy to learn the cause of his deafness  was  impossible, because his head was missing.  
  Who was he? 
[See Page 12].

11.  Which celebrity said that bringing deaf people (with a sign interpreter) to a book reading, is like bringing blind people to watch a ballet?  [See Page 14].

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12. Which completely deaf composer ​(not Beethoven) incorporated some of his tinnitus sounds in at least one of his masterpieces.  [If you missed it, it's on this page]. ​

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13.  It takes  much work for an astronomer to classify the location and intensity of a single star.  Which deaf woman classified a third of a million stars all by herself?  [See Page 12].

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14.  Which two men, deaf from childhood and self-educated, were  honored by each having a crater on the moon named after them, for their contributions to physics and engineering?
​
[See Page 12].

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15.  Glenn Curtiss founded the American aviation industry.  He teamed with the Wright brothers to create the enormous Curtiss-Wright Corporation.  Who was the deaf woman who hired him for his first aviation job, paid his salary, and worked with him?   [See Page 6].

16. What is "sign salad"?  [See Page 10].
17.  Where is this term common:  "The deaf leading the deaf?" 
         [See Page 7]
18.  In which modern army did an entire battalion of signing Deaf mutes serve as full combatants?    ​[See Page 18]

19.  In which navy were half its sailors deaf, or have defective hearing?   Hint:  It was the largest in the world at that time. 
[See Page 12]                 


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 20.  Who was the deaf person who invented ​the telephone greeting, "Hello", which eventually became a most common greeting word in the English language?  
​[See Page 11]



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21.  What's another meaning for the ASL three-finger hand sign, "I love you"?  [See Page 10].
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22. Who is that deaf baby in this 1993 postage stamp and where is he now? [See Page 7] 

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23.  This thing asks who you are and what you want, before it lets you in.  If you're deaf, ​how do you get past it?  
[See Page 16] 

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24.  Almost every American art professional recognizes these two coated figures.  They were created with carbon, string, spit, and waste paper (as was much else of this artist's work). The illiterate Deaf artist signed his name with an "X".  His work is sought by many museums.  Who was he?  [See Page 7]

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25. This is the right arm of the infant Jesus in a painting,  ​The Modanna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci.   It is in a gesture of greeting to St. John.  What else is that hand  doing (related to deafness) that took art academics 500 years to discover?  [ See Page 16 ]


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​26.. Titian was the greatest Venetian artist of the 16th Century.  He was known throughout the world as a genius in the use of color.  Who is the artist who had the honor of being equaled to Titian?   Hints:                       He was known as "the Spanish Titian"'
                He was Deaf and mute.         [See Page 16]                               
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27. Who was the king who could use his hearing aid only when he was sitting on it?  [See below]

28.  Who was the Deaf and mute kid who forced the United states mint to redesign the US nickel? [It's on this page]
        

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29. He sat down at the bar next to this girl and asked her, "Are you deaf?". He knew she wasn't.  So what's he up to?    [See page 10]
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30.  Who were the two deaf winners of the
​Nobel Prize?  [See Page 8]

​31.  If you can't sign at all, how can you instantly become an expert signer? (This is NOT a joke).  [See Page 3]

​32.  Who invented the cochlear implant?  [See Page 8]. 


33.  Who invented all that electric signal stuff that d/Deaf people use today?  [See Page 6]. 

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34.  Which deaf person produced the first visual image of the Frankenstein monster (not the one shown here) and produced the first Frankenstein movie?       ​[See page 7, right column, way down].

             _____ End of Quiz ____
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Medical hearing       exams, 1850
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  Aids To
             Hearing




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(ABOVE)  Two eartliest hearing aids, 1600s or earlier.
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In the 16th Century, hearing aids were described in the work Magia Naturalis (Magic in Nature).  They were hearing horns shaped like the ears of animals known to have sharp hearing, which was thought to gather sound better.
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In the 16th Century, sound-gathering funnels were built into walls and ceilings at places of public assembly.

​They were to catch gossip and monitor public opinion, of interest to the ruling people.  Their scale in this drawing is probably exaggerated.


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This 1890's cool dude at the opera, with his cane handle nonchalantly stuck into an ear,  hides his hearing loss with a built-in ear trumpet.  

This is a cutaway view of the hollow handle, actually a resonating chamber enclosing the horn.  Sound enters through the slots below.  

Neat.


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Here's a partially deaf lady's version
of  a hearing horn disguised as a handle for a pair of lorgnettes  glasses.  She'd hold the handle down low to hide its flared end.  The other end at her ear would be hidden with some hair.

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This whole thing could be covered with some hair.  It took  100 years for this  over-the-ear concept to be used with modern hearing aids

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​King John VI of Portugal, who reigned in the first quarter of the 19th Century, actually sat on his hearing aid.  He was very hard of hearing, and the throne had a built-in ear trumpet.  A speaker had to kneel and talk into the lion's open mouth on an armrest (Well, you have to kneel before a king anyway). 

​The sound went into a resonance chamber under the seat, and then through that tube you see with the ear plug, into King John's right ear.

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 (BELOW)  "Ear trumpets", "conversation tubes", and "hearing horns" from the 1902 Sear, Roebuck catalog.    ($1.90 back then is about $53 in 2019 dollars).  The middle one is shaped to be concealed in the hand, to be less noticeable. 

The metal ones were also referred to as "tin horns",  and the user (impolitely) as having a  "tin ear".   (Having a tin ear today describes a person who is insensitive to slight differences in music, and contemptuously to a person who can't grasp the nuances of any kind of system.)
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These are cycloramic horns for a conference around a table.  Placed in the center of the table, they pick up voices from all directions for the single hard-of-hearing listener.  

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LEFT --These binaural horns weren't a cosmetic problem for women, who could hide them in the large hairdos common at the time.
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​In this absurd design the speaker would need to stand off to the side of the wearer.  If several speakers are involved, they'd have to march around the wearer.  
One can imagine what the wearer would look like while ballroom dancing...…. or taking up three seats at the opera).
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This strange-looking hearing horn used a sea shell to gather and amplify the sound.  It took advantage of the nautiloid channel in the shell to amplify the sound and probably worked, though we don't know to what extent.
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Beards were prominent on men in the 19th Century.  This binaural hearing horn was designed to be worn under the beard, which hid most of it.

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​Someone with strange ideas about sound amplification,  cosmetics, and utility --- designed this hearing device.  It was made of thin brass and needed a strong arm to hold in place for even brief conversations.
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 This 1885 invention not only funneled the speaker's voice to the hard-of-hearing listener, but funneled her own voice to herself as well.   This was to help her monitor the quality of her voice.

There was a classroom version of this, with the instructor's tube branching out like an octopus to each student.
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This is a mid-19th Century method for conveying a particular speech sound in speech training of deaf children.

(We are still digging up details on exactly how this method functioned).


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​This Improved hearing horn contained a diaphragm to amplify the sound.  

​The ad assures you (should you actually need such assurance) that this thing goes outside, not inside your ear.



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The Invisible Artificial Eardrum Hearing Aid

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​ABOVE)  This little "medicated" marvel supposedly replaces a ruptured eardrum   -----or amplifies sound against a normal eardrum.  It is of thin, flexible rubber about 1/4 inch in diameter.  It is inserted into the ear canal   ---------the bulbous end rests on the eardrum.


Honest-looking George says it works, so we imagine it does. His advertising claimed he himself "couldn't hear a clap of thunder".  But with this marvel, George can "hear a clock ticking 30 feet away !!"   Isn't that something ?!  It retailed for $5 a pair (like $135 in 2019 dollars). 

If it didn't work, it holds history’s longest hoax award. This sort of thing was produced continuously for 70 years from 1840.   Competition among brands eventually got them all advertised as deafness cure-alls, earning a quackery ban in 1910 (by the U.S. Post Office, not the sleeping medical profession). 


The Wilson Eardrum  and the Morely Eardrum, below, are similar.  If they worked to any extent, it was because they restored some function to a troubled eardrum.                                            
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The Wilson Eardrum, was "the greatest invention of the age", according to its ad, below.

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(ABOVE)  The Morley Eardrum was a tiny  disk of  silk (a), slightly larger than the ear canal diameter.  It was pushed to the eardrum by a removable fiber tube (e). The disc was oiled to maintain its shape and acoustic seal within the canal.  A short thread (d) was tied to it for easy  extraction.

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Meet "Ignatius", 
        Mystery Inventor of the All-In-Ear Hearing Aid
The honor of having written the first published thought for an all-in-the-ear hearing aid, belongs to a polite Englishman, probably deaf.   Modestly, he provides only his first name. His letter to a publication for the Deaf was written in 1878, describing what was to come over 100 years later !!

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More Early Hearing Aids

(BELOW) The  body-worn electric hearing aid,  is an American invention.  It was patented by Alonzo Miltimore of New York in 1892.  The microphone was disguised as a badge or chest ornament.    Poor Alonzo couldn't find anyone to finance manufacture, so for him it never got past the patent drawings.  He does however, have the honor of holding the first patent for a practical and decent-looking electric hearing aid.   Actually, the idea occurred to A.G. Bell before this, but Bell didn't show much diligence in the matter.

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The first company to actually manufacture a body-worn hearing aid a decade later, in 1903, was the American firm of Hutchinson Acoustic Co.   The action right after that was mostly with firms in America and Germany.
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(BELOW) "The new marvelous electrical device that makes the deaf hear" (around 1912).  The Auris Company of New York City was one of the first to manufacture electric hearing aids in the United States.
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