South Huntsville Neighbors, July 2024

YOUR HEALTH
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Hearing Health Matters:
Connecting and Communicating
“Necessity is the mother of invention” is a proverb attributed to
Plato and infers that the primary driving force for change and invention
is a strong need. Communication is the process of connecting
with our world and other people. This connection happens when
information is received by our senses, responded to, and shared to
obtain necessities for living as well as building and maintaining relationships.
Hearing is the sense that connects us with the world by
allowing us to listen, learn, and engage in life. The need to connect
has led to the invention of many communication devices.
In 1887, the desire for communication caused Captain Arthur Keller
and wife, Kate, to travel from Tuscumbia, Alabama to Boston seeking
help for their 6-year-old daughter, Helen, who lost her hearing
and sight after an illness at the age of 19 months. They met with educator,
Alexander Graham Bell, who specialized in teaching people
who were hard of hearing or deaf. He gave them hope that their
daughter, isolated by her loss of hearing and sight, could learn to
communicate and be educated. He referred them to Boston’s Perkins
School for the Blind, where they met recent graduate Anne Sullivan,
who became Helen’s teacher and lifelong friend.
By Anita Giles MS,
CCC-A Audiologist,
Physicians Hearing Center
Despite having achieved worldwide fame, Bell was working with
children who were hard of hearing or deaf. His background provided
him with a personal perspective on the power of speech and
communication. His father and grandfather were researchers and experts
in the field of voice and speech elocution mechanics. Alexander
was their apprentice as they taught speech to people with hearing
loss. The need to communicate with his mother, Eliza Grace, and
his wife, Mabel, (who were both deafened by childhood illness) was
the impetus that caused him to focus his attention on experimenting
with sound and studying the physiology of speech. He began his
educational career in the US in 1870 teaching oral speech to students
with hearing loss and opened a school in Boston to train other teachers
in 1872. Living and working with the impact of hearing loss on
communication sparked Bell’s interest in the principles of acoustics
and speech, which led to experiments in transmitting sound waves
over wire. His pursuit to create a solution for hearing loss would ultimately
lead to the creation of one of the most important inventions
of all time: the telephone.
On March 7, 1986, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded U.S. Patent
No. 174,465 for his "electrical speech machine" -- his name for
the first telephone. Bell’s contributions to science and communication
did not end with the telephone as he held over 18 patents for his
work in communications. His need to help people with hearing loss
led to the invention of an audiometer, a device used to measure a
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