ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

19TH CENTURY

1817

April 15, Tuesday: After federal funding had been denied, the New York Legislature created a fund for the construction of the Erie, Champlain, and Hudson Canal. Ground was 1st broken at Rome on the 4th of July, and it would be completed on the 26th of October, 1825. ERIE CANAL

The institution which would become the American School for the Deaf was founded in Hartford. This was the first American school for those who could not hear. (Many schools available, of course, for those Americans who would not hear.) It had been in the early years of the 19th Century that the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet of Hartford, Connecticut had tried to teach Alice Cogswell, the deaf daughter of a surgeon. The Reverend Gallaudet had then visited the French National Institution for Deaf-Mutes and persuaded Laurent Clerc to come to the United States. On the 52-day voyage back across the Atlantic, Gallaudet had helped Clerc with English while Clerc had helped Gallaudet with sign language. Clerc was himself a tolerant man, but he would die in 1869 and his successors would not be tolerant, they would be “oralists” of the stamp HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL of Horace Mann, Sr. who would attempt to intercept the teaching of sign language to the deaf.

The impaired were to be forced to learn to make sounds even if the sounds which they produced were just awful because they themselves could not hear these sounds. Their speaking teacher would not need to know anything about sign language and would not need to have any previous experience with deaf children, any more than a teacher would have needed to have previous experience with idiots before attempting to manage them. The impaired would be forced to “learn to read lips” even if the best that could ever be achieved by “lip- reading” techniques due to the inherent ambiguity of mouth shaping was the understanding of but one sentence in ten. It would become a discipline problem, it would become a matter of training in obedience. Eventually, during our own lifetimes, if these children were caught trying to sign to each other behind their speaking teacher’s back, the teacher was instructed to draw lines upon their offending hands with a ruler. The story of the suppression of American Sign Language (ASL) is a familiar one in the rich folkloric history of the American deaf community. Few scholars, however, are aware of the campaign to eradicate ASL that began in the late nineteenth century and was led by such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell, Franklin [Benjamin] Sanborn, and Gardiner Greene Hubbard.... The reasons for the suppression were various and complex. They included perceived similarities between the deaf community and ethnic communities at a time of intense nativism, an imagined hierarchy of languages constructed from the new theories of evolution, and the rise of the concept of normality.

(Alexander Graham Bell would maintain that the ideal school “would contain only one deaf child.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1847

March 3, Wednesday: Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to Professor Alexander Melville Bell (an “elocutionist,” that is, a speech expert and teacher) and Eliza Grace Symonds (Symmonds) Bell. He was the 2d of their 3 sons, his siblings being Melville born in 1845 and Edward born in 1848.

In the US Army, Colonel Franklin Pierce was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. WAR ON MEXICO

Continuing along the tragic trajectory of the Donner disaster, Reed left the emigrant camps with 17 travelers: • Patrick and Margaret Breen and their children John, James F., Peter, Patrick Jr., and Isabella • Mary and Isaac Donner and their half brother Solomon Hook • Elizabeth Graves and her children Nancy, Jonathan, Franklin Ward, Jr., and Elizabeth • Patty and Tommy Reed. An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on her travel experiences from London to Paris was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: READ ABOUT THIS

Paris. When I wrote last I could not finish with London, and there remain yet two or three things I wish to speak of before passing to my impressions of this wonder-full Paris. I visited the model prison at Pentonville; but though in some respects an improvement upon others I have seen, — though there was the appearance of great neatness and order in the arrangements of life, kindness and good judgment in the discipline of the prisoners, — yet there was also an air of bleak forlornness about the place, and it fell far short of what my mind demands of such abodes considered as redemption schools. But as the subject of prisons is now engaging the attention of many of the wisest and best, and the tendency is in what seems to me the true direction, I need not trouble myself to make prude and hasty suggestions; it is a subject to which persons who would be of use should give the earnest devotion of calm and leisurely thought. The same day I went to see an establishment which gave me unmixed pleasure; it is a bathing establishment put at a very low rate to enable the poor to avoid one of thee worst miseries of their lot, and which yet promises to pay. Joined with this is an establishment for washing clothes, where the poor can go and hire, for almost nothing, good tubs, water ready heated, the use of an apparatus for rinsing, drying, and ironing, all so admirably arranged that a poor woman can in three hours get through an amount of washing and ironing that would, under ordinary circumstances, occupy three or four days. Especially the drying closets I contemplated with great satisfaction, and hope to see in our own country the same arrangements throughout the cities, and even in the towns and villages. Hanging out the clothes is a great exposure for women, even when they have a good place for it; but when, as is so common in cities, they must dry them in the house, how much they suffer! In New York, I know, those poor women who take in washing endure a great deal of trouble and toil from this cause; I have suffered myself from HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL being obliged to send back what had cost them so much toil, because it had been, perhaps inevitably, soiled in the drying or ironing, or filled with the smell of their miscellaneous cooking. In London it is much worse. An eminent physician told me he knew of two children whom he considered to have died because their mother, having but one room to live in, was obliged to wash and dry clothes close to their bed when they were ill. The poor people in London naturally do without washing all they can, and beneath that perpetual fall of soot the result may be guessed. All but the very poor in England put out their washing, and this custom ought to be universal in civilized countries, as it can be done much better and quicker by a few regular laundresses than by many families, and “the washing day” is so malignant a foe to the peace and joy of households that it ought to be effaced from the calendar. But as long as we are so miserable as to have any very poor people in this world, they cannot put out their washing, because they cannot earn enough money to pay for it, and, preliminary to something better, washing establishments like this of London are desirable. One arrangement that they have here in Paris will be a good one, even when we cease to have any very poor people, and, please Heaven, also to have any very rich. These are the Crèches, — houses where poor women leave their children to be nursed during the day while they are at work. I must mention that the superintendent of the washing establishment observed, with a legitimate triumph, that it had been built without giving a single dinner or printing a single puff, — an extraordinary thing, indeed, for England! To turn to something a little gayer, — the embroidery on this tattered coat of civilized life, — I went into only two theatres; one the Old Drury, once the scene of great glories, now of execrable music and more execrable acting. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it. At the Sadler’s Wells theatre I saw a play which I had much admired in reading it, but found still better in actual representation; indeed, it seems to me there can be no better acting play: this is “The Patrician’s Daughter,” by J.W. Marston. The movement is rapid, yet clear and free; the dialogue natural, dignified, and flowing; the characters marked with few, but distinct strokes. Where the tone of discourse rises with manly sentiment or passion, the audience applauded with bursts of generous feeling that gave me great pleasure, for this play is one that, in its scope and meaning, marks the new era in England; it is full of an experience which is inevitable to a man of talent there, and is harbinger of the day when the noblest commoner shall be the only noble possible in England. But how different all this acting to what I find in France! Here the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout. Not one touch of that stage strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here. For the first time in my life I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I had needed any, that all men will prefer what is good to what is bad, if only a fair opportunity for choice be allowed. When I came here, my first thought was to go and see Mademoiselle Rachel. I was sure that in her I HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL should find a true genius, absolutely the diamond, and so it proved. I went to see her seven or eight times, always in parts that required great force of soul and purity of taste even to conceive them, and only once had reason to find fault with her. On one single occasion I saw her violate the harmony of the character to produce effect at a particular moment; but almost invariably I found her a true artist, worthy Greece, and worthy at many moments to have her conceptions immortalized in marble. Her range even in high tragedy is limited. She can only express the darker passions, and grief in its most desolate aspects. Nature has not gifted her with those softer and more flowery attributes that lend to pathos its utmost tenderness. She does not melt to tears, or calm or elevate the heart by the presence of that tragic beauty that needs all the assaults of Fate to make it show its immortal sweetness. Her noblest aspect is when sometimes she expresses truth in some severe shape, and rises, simple and austere, above the mixed elements around her. On the dark side, she is very great in hatred and revenge. I admired her more in Phedre than in any other part in which I saw her. The guilty love inspired by the hatred of a goddess was expressed in all its symptoms with a force and terrible naturalness that almost suffocated the beholder. After she had taken the poison, the exhaustion and paralysis of the system, the sad, cold, calm submission to Fate, were still more grand. I had heard so much about the power of her eye in one fixed look, and the expression she could concentrate in a single word, that the utmost results could only satisfy my expectations. It is, indeed, something magnificent to see the dark cloud give out such sparks, each one fit to deal a separate death; but it was not that I admired most in her: it was the grandeur, truth, and depth of her conception of each part, and the sustained purity with which she represented it. For the rest, I shall write somewhere a detailed critique upon the parts in which I saw her. It is she who has made me acquainted with the true way of viewing French tragedy. I had no idea of its powers and symmetry till now, and have received from the revelation high pleasure and a crowd of thoughts. The French language from her lips is a divine dialect; it is stripped of its national and personal peculiarities, and becomes what any language must, moulded by such a genius, the pure music of the heart and soul. I never could remember her tone in speaking any word; it was too perfect; you had received the thought quite direct. Yet, had I never heard her speak a word, my mind would, be filled by her attitudes. Nothing more graceful can be conceived, nor could the genius of sculpture surpass her management of the antique drapery. She has no beauty except in the intellectual severity of her outline, and bears marks of age which will grow stronger every year, and make her ugly before long. Still it will be a grandiose, gypsy, or rather Sibylline ugliness, well adapted to the expression of some tragic parts. Only it seems as if she could not live long; she expends force enough upon a part to furnish out a dozen common lives. Though the French tragedy is well acted throughout, yet unhappily there is no male actor now with a spark of fire, and these men seem the meanest pigmies by the side of Rachel; — so on the scene, beside the tragedy intended by the author, you see also that common tragedy, a woman of genius who throws away her HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL precious heart, lives and dies for one unworthy of her. In parts this effect is productive of too much pain. I saw Rachel one night with her brother and sister. The sister imitated her so closely that you could not help seeing she had a manner, and an imitable manner. Her brother was in the play her lover, — a wretched automaton, and presenting the most unhappy family likeness to herself. Since then I have hardly cared to go and see her. We could wish with geniuses, as with the Phoenix, to see only one of the family at a time. In the pathetic or sentimental drama Paris boasts another young actress, nearly as distinguished in that walk as Rachel in hers. This is Rose Cheny, whom we saw in her ninety-eighth personation of Clarissa Harlowe, and afterward in Genevieve and the Protégé sans le Savoir, — a little piece written expressly for her by Scribe. The “Miss Clarisse” of the French drama is a feeble and partial reproduction of the heroine of Richardson; indeed, the original in all its force of intellect and character would have been too much for the charming Rose Cheny, but to the purity and lovely tenderness of Clarissa she does full justice. In the other characters she was the true French girl, full of grace and a mixture of naïveté and cunning, sentiment and frivolity, that is winning and piquant, if not satisfying. Only grief seems very strange to those bright eyes; we do not find that they can weep much and bear the light of day, and the inhaling of charcoal seems near at hand to their brightest pleasures. At the other little theatres you see excellent acting, and a sparkle of wit unknown to the world out of France. The little pieces in which all the leading topics of the day are reviewed are full of drolleries that make you laugh at each instant. Poudre-Colon is the only one of these I have seen; in this, among other jokes, Dumas, in the character of Monte-Christo and in a costume half Oriental, half juggler, is made to pass the other theatres in review while seeking candidates for his new one. Dumas appeared in court yesterday, and defended his own cause against the editors who sue him for evading some of his engagements. I was very desirous to hear him speak, and went there in what I was assured would be very good season; but a French audience, who knew the ground better, had slipped in before me, and I returned, as has been too often the case with me in Paris, having seen nothing but endless staircases, dreary vestibules, and gens d’armes. The hospitality of le grande nation to the stranger is, in many respects, admirable. Galleries, libraries, cabinets of coins, museums, are opened in the most liberal manner to the stranger, warmed, lighted, ay, and guarded, for him almost all days in the week; treasures of the past are at his service; but when anything is happening in the present, the French run quicker, glide in more adroitly, and get possession of the ground. I find it not the most easy matter to get to places even where there is nothing going on, there is so much tiresome fuss of getting billets from one and another to be gone through; but when something is happening it is still worse. I missed hearing M. Guizot in his speech on the Montpensier marriage, which would have given a very good idea of his manner, and which, like this defence of M. Dumas, was a skilful piece of work as regards evasion of the truth. The good feeling toward England which had been fostered with so much care and toil seems to have been entirely dissipated by the mutual recriminations about this marriage, and the old dislike flames up more fiercely for having been hid awhile beneath the ashes. I saw the little HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL Duchess, the innocent or ignorant cause of all this disturbance, when presented at court. She went round the circle on the arm of the Queen. Though only fourteen, she looks twenty, but has something fresh, engaging, and girlish about her. I fancy it will soon be rubbed out under the drill of the royal household. I attended not only at the presentation, but at the ball given at the Tuileries directly after. These are fine shows, as the suite of apartments is very handsome, brilliantly lighted, and the French ladies surpass all others in the art of dress; indeed, it gave me much, pleasure to see them. Certainly there are many ugly ones, but they are so well dressed, and have such an air of graceful vivacity, that the general effect was that of a flower-garden. As often happens, several American women were among the most distinguished for positive beauty; one from Philadelphia, who is by many persons considered the prettiest ornament of the dress circle at the Italian Opera, was especially marked by the attention of the king. However, these ladies, even if here a long time, do not attain the air and manner of French women; the magnetic atmosphere that envelops them is less brilliant and exhilarating in its attractions. It was pleasant to my eye, which has always been so wearied in our country by the sombre masses of men that overcloud our public assemblies, to see them now in so great variety of costume, color, and decoration. Among the crowd wandered Leverrier, in the costume of Academician, looking as if he had lost, not found, his planet. French savants are more generally men of the world, and even men of fashion, than those of other climates; but, in his case, he seemed not to find it easy to exchange the music of the spheres for the music of fiddles. Speaking of Leverrier leads to another of my disappointments. I went to the Sorbonne to hear him lecture, nothing dreaming that the old pedantic and theological character of those halls was strictly kept up in these days of light. An old guardian of the inner temple, seeing me approach, had his speech all ready, and, manning the entrance, said with a disdainful air, before we had time to utter a word, “Monsieur may enter if he pleases, but Madame must remain here” (i.e. in the court-yard). After some exclamations of surprise, I found an alternative in the Hotel de Clugny, where I passed an hour very delightfully while waiting for my companion. The rich remains of other centuries are there so arranged that they can be seen to the best advantage; many of the works in ivory, china, and carved wood are truly splendid or exquisite. I saw a dagger with jewelled hilt which talked whole poems to my mind. In the various “Adorations of the Magi,” I found constantly one of the wise men black, and with the marked African lineaments. Before I had half finished, my companion came and wished me at least to visit the lecture-rooms of the Sorbonne, now that the talk, too good for female ears, was over. But the guardian again interfered to deny me entrance. “You can go, Madame,” said he, “to the College of France; you can go to this and t’other place, but you cannot enter here.” “What, sir,” said I, “is it your institution alone that remains in a state of barbarism?” “Que voulez vous, Madame?” he replied, and, as he spoke, his little dog began to bark at me, — “Que voulez vous, Madame? c’est la regle,” — “What would you have, Madam? IT IS THE RULE,” — a reply which makes me laugh even now, as I think how the satirical wits of former HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL days might have used it against the bulwarks of learned dulness. I was more fortunate in hearing Arago, and he justified all my expectations. Clear, rapid, full and equal, his discourse is worthy its celebrity, and I felt repaid for the four hours one is obliged to spend in going, in waiting, and in hearing; for the lecture begins at half past one, and you must be there before twelve to get a seat, so constant and animated is his popularity. I have attended, with some interest, two discussions at the Athenée, — one on Suicide, the other on the Crusades. They are amateur affairs, where, as always at such times, one hears much, nonsense and vanity, much making of phrases and sentimental grimace; but there was one excellent speaker, adroit and rapid as only a Frenchman could be. With admirable readiness, skill, and rhetorical polish, he examined the arguments of all the others, and built upon their failures a triumph for himself. His management of the language, too, was masterly, and French is the best of languages for such a purpose, — clear, flexible, full of sparkling points and quick, picturesque turns, with a subtile blandness that makes the dart tickle while it wounds. Truly he pleased the fancy, filled the ear, and carried us pleasantly along over the smooth, swift waters; but then came from the crowd a gentleman, not one of the appointed orators of the evening, but who had really something in his heart to say, — a grave, dark man, with Spanish eyes, and the simple dignity of honor and earnestness in all his gesture and manner. He said in few and unadorned words his say, and the sense of a real presence filled the room, and those charms of rhetoric faded, as vanish the beauties of soap-bubbles from the eyes of astonished childhood. I was present on one good occasion at the Academy the day that M. Rémusat was received there in the place of Royer-Collard. I looked down from one of the tribunes upon the flower of the celebrities of France, that is to say, of the celebrities which are authentic, comme il faut. Among them were many marked faces, many fine heads; but in reading the works of poets we always fancy them about the age of Apollo himself, and I found with pain some of my favorites quite old, and very unlike the company on Parnassus as represented by Raphael. Some, however, were venerable, even noble, to behold. Indeed, the literary dynasty of France is growing old, and here, as in England and Germany, there seems likely to occur a serious gap before the inauguration of another, if indeed another is coming. However, it was an imposing sight; there are men of real distinction now in the Academy, and Molière would have a fair chance if he were proposed to-day. Among the audience I saw many ladies of fine expression and manner, as well as one or two precieuses ridicules, a race which is never quite extinct. M. Rémusat, as is the custom on these occasions, painted the portrait of his predecessor; the discourse was brilliant and discriminating in the details, but the orator seemed to me to neglect drawing some obvious inferences which would have given a better point of view for his subject. A séance to me much more impressive find interesting was one which borrowed nothing from dress, decorations, or the presence of titled pomp. I went to call on La Mennais, to whom I had a letter, I found him in a little study; his secretary was writing in a larger room through which I passed. With him was a somewhat citizen-looking, but vivacious, elderly man, whom I was at first sorry to see, having wished for half an hour’s undisturbed visit HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL to the apostle of Democracy. But how quickly were those feelings displaced by joy when he named to me the great national lyrist of France, the unequalled Béranger. I had not expected to see him at all, for he is not one to be seen in any show place; he lives in the hearts of the people, and needs no homage from their eyes. I was very happy in that little study in presence of these two men, whose influence has been so great, so real. To me Béranger has been much; his wit, his pathos, his exquisite lyric grace, have made the most delicate strings vibrate, and I can feel, as well as see, what he is in his nation and his place. I have not personally received anything from La Mennais, as, born under other circumstances, mental facts which he, once the pupil of Rome, has learned by passing through severe ordeals, are at the basis of all my thoughts. But I see well what he has been and is to Europe, and of what great force of nature and spirit. He seems suffering and pale, but in his eyes is the light of the future. These are men who need no flourish of trumpets to announce their coming, — no band of martial music upon their steps, — no obsequious nobles in their train. They are the true kings, the theocratic kings, the judges in Israel. The hearts of men make music at their approach; the mind of the age is the historian of their passage; and only men of destiny like themselves shall be permitted to write their eulogies, or fill their vacant seats. Wherever there is a genius like his own, a germ of the finest fruit still hidden beneath the soil, the “Chante pauvre petit” of Béranger shall strike, like a sunbeam, and give it force to emerge, and wherever there is the true Crusade, — for the spirit, not the tomb of Christ, — shall be felt an echo of the “Que tes armes soient benis jeune soldat” of La Mennais. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1859

December: On St. Helena, a Fire Association was formed and St. Paul’s Church became a cathedral.

The mother of Alexander Graham Bell, Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, had during this year been losing her hearing. At the age of 12 “Aleck,” as he was called, devised an indoor mechanism to separate the husks of wheat grains — a task that had traditionally been accomplished by the pounding of “flails” on pile of wheat on a flat outdoor surface, following by tossing with shovels to “winnow” in a breeze.

In a sermon, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway welcomed Charles Darwin’s newly published THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES.... He considered that here was scientific proof that everything was inevitably going to go on going to get better and better. He understood not a word of what he had read.1

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

1. He translated the most utterly nonprovidential of all science into the very most providential! A quarter-century later he would learn that in his initial enthusiasm for biological progress, he had neglected to observe “that it was possible for man to develop himself and his world downward.” –Well, nobody ever accused this gent of being excessively bright, though of course he could think very well on his feet when the situation demanded this, and also could think very well with his feet when that was what the situation seemed to demand. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1863

February: The father of Alexander Graham Bell, the “elocutionist” Alexander Melville Bell, took him along on a trip to inspect an “automation machine” that could mimic the sound of the human voice. He became interested in speech and language and translated a German book by another famous scientist so that he could build such a device with the help of his brother as could produce the sounds of human speech electronically.

Back home in Concord from her service in Washington DC, Louisa May Alcott was wearing a lace cap to cover the baldness caused by the doses of calomel that had been prescribed for her at the Army hospital.

“For 2400 years patients have believed that doctors were doing them good; for 2300 years they were wrong.”

— David Wootton, BAD MEDICINE: DOCTORS DOING HARM SINCE HIPPOCRATES, Oxford, June 2006

She was troubled by repeated mercury-poisoning delusions in which Spanish grandees leaped out of closets at her, etc. Dr. Josiah Bartlett visited her every day, and in all probability this is the point at which she began her use of opium.

WALDEN: The old and infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, PEOPLE OF thought most of sickness, and sudden accident and death; to them WALDEN life seemed full of danger, –what danger is there if you don’t think of any?– and they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment’s warning. To them the village was literally a com-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

DR. JOSIAH BARTLETT

ALCOTT FAMILY HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

I AM A NEGATIVE PHILOSOPHER, NOT A POSITIVE ONE: PHILOSOPHY NOT BEING ANY SORT OF SCIENCE, I WOULD HOLD THAT ANY PHILOSOPHICAL ASSERTION THAT TRAVELS UNDER THE PRETENSE THAT IT IS FACTUAL AND ACTUAL MUST BE, TO THE CONTRARY, NECESSARILY SPURIOUS AND UNSUBSTANTIATED. A GOOD EXAMPLE IS THE OFT-HEARD SUPPOSITION “GOD KNOWS THE FUTURE.” AS A NEGATIVIST I NEGATE ANY AND ALL SUCH ASSERTIONS. THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE ME TO REPLACE THESE PSEUDOFACTUAL PHILOSOPHICAL ASSERTIONS WITH MY OWN COUNTERCLAIMS, SUCH AS A POSITIVE ASSERTION THAT IN ORDER TO ALLOW FOR FREE WILL AND FREEDOM OF DECISION “GOD CANNOT KNOW THE FUTURE.” I DO NOT INTEND TO TAKE YOUR GRITTY, GRIMY TEDDY BEAR AWAY FROM YOU AND PRESENT YOU WITH A CUTE CUDDLY PANDA. I WILL TAKE AWAY YOUR TEDDY LEAVING YOU EMPTY-ARMED. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL I HAVE SAID THAT RATHER THAN BEING OF THE OPINION OF BOETHIUS, WHO WROTE IN 523AD THAT GOD, BEING ETERNAL, MUST BE “OUTSIDE” TIME AND ABLE TO VIEW THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE AS INDIFFERENTLY AND UNCHANGINGLY PRESENT IN HIS ONE WHOLE CREATION, I AM INCLINED TO THE OPINION OF MAIMONIDES, WHO WROTE IN THE 12TH CENTURY THAT ACCORDING TO THE TALMUD FREE WILL IS GRANTED TO EVERY PERSON BY GOD SO THAT WE MAY BE JUDGED ACCORDING TO OUR ACTIONS. AS GERSONIDES POINTED OUT IN THE 14TH CENTURY, THERE ARE DECIDED LIMITS TO FOREKNOWLEDGE, AS GOD CANNOT KNOW IN ADVANCE WHICH CHOICE A FREE INDIVIDUAL, IN HIS OR HER FREEDOM, WILL MAKE: “I HAVE SET BEFORE YOU LIFE AND DEATH, BLESSING AND CURSE: THEREFORE CHOOSE LIFE.” HOWEVER, I WAS LYING WHEN I SAID THAT. ACTUALLY I HAVE NO PREFERENCE FOR THE PSEUDOPHILOSOPHICAL RANTINGS OF MAIMONIDES AND GERSONIDES OVER THE PSEUDOPHILOSOPHICAL RANTINGS OF BOETHIUS. I AM ENTIRELY NEGATIVE. THERE IS NOT A POSITIVE BONE IN MY BODY. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1865

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

When the family of origin of Alexander Graham Bell moved to London, 16-year-old “Aleck” remained in Scotland to make of himself a teacher of elocution and music. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1866

Benjamin Apthorp Gould was able to employ the Atlantic telegraph cable to establish accurate longitude relations between Europe and America. His measurements of Lewis Morris Rutherfurd’s photographs of the Pleiades had made of him one of the pioneers in the use of the camera as an instrument of precision and he would secure, at Córdoba in Argentina, 1,400 negatives of southern star clusters the reduction of which would require the remaining period of his life.

Alexander Graham Bell joined his older brother Melville James Bell as a student at the University of Edinburgh but found himself so exhausted that he was confined to his bed most of the time (his younger brother Edward Charles Bell was at that point suffering from tuberculosis and would in the following year succumb; his older brother would also succumb to TB, in 1870).

When Biela’s Comet was supposed to appear during this year after not being seen when expected in 1859, it was again nonapparent. It would seem that this comet had disintegrated into what we now experience as the Andromedid meteor shower, a shower that travels in virtually the same orbit and had been being observed at least since 1741. SKY EVENT HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1867

The drawing of Sojourner Truth leaning over a washtub at the Association of Industry and Education in the 1840s dates to about this year. Since it is by Charles C. Burleigh, Jr., and since he was a babe in arms at the time that Sojourner was actually leaning over washtubs at the Association, this drawing must be entirely from the imagination and evidentiarily it is without value.

In Northampton in this year, the Clarke School for the Deaf was being established.

Professor Alexander Melville Bell’s VISIBLE SPEECH: THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL ALPHABETICS; OR SELF- INTERPRETING PHYSIOLOGICAL LETTERS, FOR THE WRITING OF ALL LANGUAGES IN ONE ALPHABET. ILLUSTRATED BY TABLES, DIAGRAMS, AND EXAMPLES (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co.; London and New York: N. Trübner & Co.)

May 17, Friday: Alexander Graham Bell’s brother Edward Charles Bell died at the age of 19 due to tuberculosis. He would return to his family home in Scotland. His older brother Melville James Bell would get married and move away to open a new school of elocution (until he also would die of TB). Having abandoned formal education, Aleck would be spending much of his spare time studying. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1870

May 28, Saturday: Ludwig, Count Holstein replaced Christian Emil Krog-Juel-Vind-Fris, Count Frijsenborg as prime minister of Denmark.

Alexander Graham Bell’s older brother Melville James Bell succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 25. During this month the family emigrated to Brantford, Ontario so his father, who also had become a tuberculosis patient, could attempt to recuperate. Aleck had at the age of 23 fallen ill but would recover. Melville James Bell’s widow Caroline Ottaway Bell would remarry in Brantford, Ontario with George Ballachey. Residing in a carriage house in Ontario, Aleck produced a written version of the Mohawk dialect spoken in Canada, for which Chief George Henry Martin Johnson pronounced him an honorary chief. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1871

April: The Reverend Robert Collyer again visited England, land of his birth.

Alexander Graham Bell moved from Newfoundland to Boston, to teach his Visible Speech System. Here he is in this year, included in a photo of the students and teachers of Sarah Fuller’s Boston School for Deaf Mutes on Pemberton Avenue in (he is at the top right) — at which he was acting as a substitute for his father Professor Alexander Melville Bell in instructing not the pupils but their teachers.

This is where he began experimenting on the “multiple telegraph experiments” which led into his “telephone” experiments. It was during this period that he was introduced to Mabel Gardiner Hubbard, who would become his wife. The Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet of the American Asylum for Deaf-Mutes in Hartford, Connecticut and Harriet Burbank Rogers of the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, would invite him to teach also in their kindred institutions.

IT IS A PROBLEM, FOR A “PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY” SUCH AS MYSELF (AUSTIN MEREDITH), THAT PEOPLE WHO HAVE HEARD THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING AS “HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY” –PEOPLE WHO MAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL EVEN HAVE GONE TO THE LENGTHS OF CONSULTING ONE OR ANOTHER “HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY” SUCH AS THAT CREATED BY UEBERWEG IN THE 19TH CENTURY– HAVE NEVER SO MUCH AS CONTEMPLATED THAT THERE MIGHT BE SUCH A THING AS ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY BASED ON DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE NATURE OF TIME. THE GIST OF MY PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, BASED ON MY OWN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE OF TIME, IS AS FOLLOWS: OUR SO- CALLED HISTORIANS ARE DOING IT EXACTLY WRONG. IN THEIR FABRICATIONS ABOUT HISTORY, THEY ARE CHRONIC ANTICIPATORS. THEY PERPETUALLY OFFER TO THEIR UNSUSPECTING AUDIENCES THAT ACCOUNTS THEY HAVE PATCHED TOGETHER IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS ILLUMINATE OUR PRESENT CONDITION. THEIR CONSTRUCTED PASTS BECOME OUR PREAMBLE FOR OUR PRESENT AGENDAS. THESE ACADEMIC PSEUDO-HISTORIANS WHO ENGAGE IN THIS ANTICIPATION AGENDA ARE WELL PAID BUT THEY OFFEND AGAINST REALITY. ANY HISTORY CONSTRUCTED IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS CAN AMOUNT TO NOTHING MORE THAN SPURIOUS MAKE-MAKE-BELIEVE, SPECIAL PLEADING. THE WARNING OF THE HIPPIE WAS “NEVER TRUST ANYONE OVER 30!” THE WARNING I PROFFER IS: “DON’T CREDIT ANY HISTORY THAT IS CREDIBLE. WHEN ANY OF THIS BEGINS TO MAKE ANY SENSE, DOUBLE-BEWARE!” TO BE SPECIFIC, THIS KOUROO DATABASE IS JUST CHOCK-FULL OF HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGIES. IF ANY OF THESE PROFFERED HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGIES ARE MORE THAN MERELY ACCURATE, IF ANY OF THEM OVER AND ABOVE THEIR ACCURACY BEGIN TO APPEAR TO YOU TO PROVIDE ANY PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATIONS OF OUR PRESENT CONDITION, THAT SHOULD BE ENOUGH TO MAKE YOUR SUSPICION- ANTENNAE BEGIN TO VIBRATE AND HUM. BIGTIME! I AM NOT CREATING THESE ACCURATE CHRONOLOGIES TO HELP YOU GROK YOUR PRESENT CONDITION. I AM CREATING THESE ACCURATE CHRONOLOGIES TO HELP YOU NON-GROK YOUR PRESENT CONDITION.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1872

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Visible speech as a means of communication articulation to deaf-mutes.” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, 17, 1-21.

Alexander Graham Bell’s ESTABLISHMENT FOR THE STUDY OF VOCAL PHYSIOLOGY: FOR THE CORRECTION OF STAMMERING, ETC., AND FOR THE PRACTICAL INSTRUCTION IN “VISIBLE SPEECH.” Boston: Rand Avery & Co. (16 pages).

(and 1873) Alexander Graham Bell’s “The Sanders Reader.” Excerpts reprinted in Volta Review, 1964, 66, 122-123. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL October: H.G.O. Blake’s married daughter Sarah Chandler Blake Hamilton died in Boston.

Alexander Graham Bell opened his own school for the deaf at 18 Beacon Street in Boston, calling it “The School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech.” He would have 30 pupils. He began to put out, copied in longhand, a a small magazine for a small circle of persons, The Visible Speech Pioneer. Helen Keller would be one of his more famous students.

Keller would allege that her teacher Bell had dedicated his life to the penetration of that “inhuman silence which separates and estranges.” In 1893 Keller would herself do the sod-breaking at a ceremony for the construction of Bell’s new Volta Bureau dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf.”

John Lord, LL.D.’s THE LIFE OF EMMA WILLARD (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 549 & 551 Broadway, 1883). LIFE OF EMMA WILLARD

The nature of Mrs. Willard was frank, confiding, hopeful, enthusiastic, and affectionate. She was just the person to be the victim of a designing, cold, and calculating marriage- seeker. ... Mrs. Willard, affectionate and impulsive as was her nature, was not the woman to do any thing rashly or blindly. In process of time rumors reached her ears that Dr. Yates was lacking in those things upon which she place the utmost importance — that he was lax and even infidel in his religious opinions. She was shaken in her opinion, and was, of course, rendered very unhappy. Misunderstandings arose, which culminated in the breaking of the engagement ... it was broken on religious and lofty grounds.... Dr. Yates had declared to HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL Mrs. Willard herself that he was a Christian — not in any technical sense, but in the full import of that term. ... I questioned the doctor, more closely than I at first expected to do, in regard to his religious belief. He assured me that he was not only a believer in the Deity, but in Jesus Christ. He has doubts, however, on the question of the divinity of Christ.... Through ingenious arts, by himself or through others, Dr. Yates at last accomplished his purpose. Mrs. Willard weakly and foolishly relented, and the marriage took place on the 17th of September, 1838. The mask which Dr. Yates had worn was now thrown off. His aim evidently was to gain possession of Mrs. Willard’s property, which he could only do by mean devices, since she had been prudent enough to secure her separate estate by a marriage contract. He was determined that she should pay all his expenses. Within two hours after the marriage ceremony, he called upon her to furnish the money for the expenses of the wedding-dinner. ... Draft after draft did she sign in tears, and merely in compliance with his will. All her suggestions of prudence and economy were met with insult and abuse. She saw her property fast disappearing, and inevitable ruin staring her in the face. ... he now proposed that she should convey to him the sum of ten thousand dollars. He wished her to purchase a magnificent mansion, and bestow it upon himself and his daughter.... In the course of less than ten months seven thousand dollars of her estate were expended, and about five thousand dollars more were subsequently obtained and converted to his own use. ... A costly necklace, with ornaments of jewelry, which the petitioner had purchased in Europe, he seized and bestowed upon his daughter, though it was subsequently relinquished. But his scheme did not end here. While your petitioner resided with the respondent at Boston, it was the practice of the family to meet on Sunday mornings for family worship. He used, on such occasions, to read a chapter in the Bible, and afterward read prayers from a book. While the other members of the family knelt, he remained sitting. ... there was probably no blindness on the part of Dr. Yates, only simple calculation. All his professions of love were, doubtless, insincere. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1873

Alexander Graham Bell became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University.

Fall Professor Alexander Graham Bell discontinued teaching to experiment with sound backed by a gift from businessman Thomas Sanders of a laboratory and quarters near Salem. Within months he would be able to create a “harmonic telegraph” that could send multiple messages simultaneously. At MIT he analyzed electric devices that transmitted various frequencies of soundwave, and transformed a replication of the original voice.

Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 3

I. Whose is the Child? II. Science, Philosophy, and Religion CATHOLICISM III. Papal Infallibility IV. Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN V. The Church Above the State VI. True and False Science VII. Sisters of Mercy VIII. Literary Notices and Criticisms

ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON CHARLES DARWIN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1874

Josiah Gilbert Holland’s volume of poetry THE MISTRESS OF THE MANSE. Nobody ever reads this now. THE MISTRESS OF THE MANSE

Charles Dudley Warner’s BADDECK, AND THAT SORT OF THING (Houghton, Mifflin and Company). This would be read by Alexander Graham Bell, although, when Morris Longstreth would tour Baddeck in 1935, he would be unable to locate anyone there who had ever heard either of Charles Dudley Warner or of his book about their town.

May: Robert Louis Stevenson placed “Ordered South” in Macmillan’s Magazine.

Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution was encouraging Alexander Graham Bell in his searching for a harp arrangement of harmonic reeds, by which to vibrate a membrane. Bell began experimenting with the phonoautograph, a device involving a moving pen that traced lines on smoked glass to capture the 2- dimensional shapes of the sound waves of the human voice, and of musical instruments.

Summer: Two of Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson’s watercolors, “The Milkmaid” and “Wait For Me,” were displayed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and sold, and she received commissions for further such works.

Edwin Morton went on a sail around the world by way of Japan and India.

Alexander Graham Bell came up with the idea of a telephone. He hired as his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1875

June 2, Wednesday: Alexander Graham Bell and electrical engineer Thomas Augustus Watson, on their way to a new concept and a new thingie, telephony, experimented with acoustic telegraphy. Bell was able to simplify the transmission of intelligible speech vibrations over a single reed, and discontinued his experiments with multiple vibrators. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1876

Does the name “Pa Bell” ring a bell? In Boston, Alexander Graham Bell improved a sulfuric acid and water microphone invented by Professor Elisha Gray of Oberlin College that carried undulations through a needle. He intuited in addition that a tube containing liquid mercury might carry vocal waves over a distance. His various experiments would result eventually in the telephone, a device making it unnecessary to rely on any such scheme as the telegraph, and its associated Morse Code — by enabling the intact transmission and reception of the human voice. ELECTRIC William Smith obtained a patent for a jet siphon water closet. This model would attract the attention of WALDEN American sanitary engineer Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., who would develop it into larger pieces of what was then being referred to as “sanitaryware.”

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.

February 14, Monday: Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents for the electrical transmission of sound, which is to say, related to the telephone (the US Supreme Court would rule Bell’s to be the rightful patent because his application had been presented to the patent clerk a couple of hours earlier, and because in March he’d been able to exhibit a primitive working prototype of his device).

BETWEEN ANY TWO MOMENTS ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF MOMENTS, AND BETWEEN THESE OTHER MOMENTS LIKEWISE AN INFINITE NUMBER, THERE BEING NO ATOMIC MOMENT JUST AS THERE IS NO ATOMIC POINT ALONG A LINE. MOMENTS ARE THEREFORE FIGMENTS. THE PRESENT MOMENT IS A MOMENT AND AS SUCH IS A FIGMENT, A FLIGHT OF THE IMAGINATION TO WHICH NOTHING REAL CORRESPONDS. SINCE PAST

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL MOMENTS HAVE PASSED OUT OF EXISTENCE AND FUTURE MOMENTS HAVE YET TO ARRIVE, WE NOTE THAT THE PRESENT MOMENT IS ALL THAT EVER EXISTS — AND YET THE PRESENT MOMENT BEING A MOMENT IS A FIGMENT TO WHICH NOTHING IN REALITY CORRESPONDS.

March 7, Tuesday: After a 3-day battle Abyssinians defeated Egyptians at Gura.

Alexander Graham Bell was granted United States patent #174,465 for “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically — by causing electronical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds” (this would be contested in court in some 300 different cases). TELEPHONE

March 10, Friday: In Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the 1st (one-way) telephone communication was effected when Alexander Graham Bell exclaimed, near the device, “Mr. Watson — come here — I want you” and this was heard clearly in the adjoining room.

Performed for the initial time, theme original et variations op.19/6 for piano, by Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, in Moscow.

FIGURING OUT WHAT AMOUNTS TO A “HISTORICAL CONTEXT” IS WHAT THE CRAFT OF HISTORICIZING AMOUNTS TO, AND THIS NECESSITATES DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN THE SET OF EVENTS THAT MUST HAVE TAKEN PLACE BEFORE EVENT E COULD BECOME POSSIBLE, AND MOST CAREFULLY DISTINGUISHING THEM FROM ANOTHER SET OF EVENTS THAT COULD NOT POSSIBLY OCCUR UNTIL SUBSEQUENT TO EVENT E.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL May 25, Thursday: At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone publicly for the 1st time.

Waldo Emerson’s 73d birthday.

HISTORY’S NOT MADE OF WOULD. WHEN SOMEONE REVEALS, FOR INSTANCE, THAT A PARTICULAR INFANT WOULD INVENT THE SEWING MACHINE, S/HE DISCLOSES THAT WHAT IS BEING CRAFTED IS NOT REALITY BUT PREDESTINARIANISM. THE HISTORIAN IS SETTING CHRONOLOGY TO “SHUFFLE,” WHICH IS NOT A PERMISSIBLE OPTION BECAUSE IN THE REAL WORLD SUCH SHUFFLE IS IMPOSSIBLE. THE RULE OF REALITY IS THAT THE FUTURE HASN’T EVER HAPPENED, YET. THERE IS NO SUCH “BIRD’S EYE VIEW” AS THIS IN THE REAL WORLD, FOR IN THE REAL WORLD NO REAL BIRD HAS EVER GLIMPSED AN ACTUAL HISTORICAL SEQUENCE.

August 3, Thursday: Alexander Graham Bell received the 1st intelligible long-distance phonecall, from Brantford about 4 miles away. After this, Bell would become willing to demonstrate and speak to the public about his new device.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL August 10, Thursday: Edward William Lane died in Worthing, Sussex. The body would be placed in West Norwood Cemetery. Leila Ahmed would prepare a biography, EDWARD W. LANE, for publication in London by Longman during this year. He had been unable to complete his massive Arabic-English dictionary, arriving only at the letter Qaf, the 21st of the Arabic alphabet. Great-nephew Stanley Lane-Poole would be completing the work during the following two decades: AN A RABIC-ENGLISH LEXICON: DERIVED FROM THE BEST AND THE MOST COPIOUS EASTERN SOURCES (Williams and Norgate).

WALDEN: the cornice of the palace

finished — the mason

returns to his hut HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL In Canada Alexander Graham Bell had just demonstrated an ability to communicate over 5 miles of stove wire, strung along fences and telegraph poles and through a tunnel, between Brantford and Mount Pleasant, Ontario. What he achieved could be considered to be the 1st long-distance telephone call (although it consisted merely of being able to hear in the Dominion Telegraph Company office in White’s Boot and Shoe Store in the town of Paris in Ontario, despite bubbling and cracking sounds, a one-way communication from the telegraph office in Brantford some 6 miles distant, of audible musical notes and singing, plus demonstrating that it was possible to distinguish between the voices of different persons who spoke into his mouthpiece).

WALDEN: the devil his due

improved means

unimproved end

YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT EITHER THE REALITY OF TIME OVER THAT OF CHANGE, OR CHANGE OVER TIME — IT’S PARMENIDES, OR HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL HERACLITUS. I HAVE GONE WITH HERACLITUS.

October 9, Monday: The initial 2-way long distance telephone conversation, between Cambridgeport and downtown Boston on the far side of the Charles River.2

ONE COULD BE ELSEWHERE, AS ELSEWHERE DOES EXIST. ONE CANNOT BE ELSEWHEN SINCE ELSEWHEN DOES NOT. (TO THE WILLING MANY THINGS CAN BE EXPLAINED, THAT FOR THE UNWILLING WILL REMAIN FOREVER MYSTERIOUS.)

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

2. Although the call lasted 3 hours, no-one would be billed an arm and a leg. Later in this same year the New-York telephone directory would spring into existence — as a card listing 252 names. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1877

In this year Thomas Alva Edison built his 1st phonograph and tried to brainstorm a use for the device.3 “Why not,” he speculated, “use this thing to record the last words of people who are dying?”4 The first Bell telephone set was sold. Such a device was installed in the White House in Washington DC (its phonenumber was of course “1”).

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE THAT IT IS MORTALS WHO CONSUME OUR HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, FOR WHAT WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO DO IS EVADE THE RESTRICTIONS OF THE HUMAN LIFESPAN. (IMMORTALS, WITH NOTHING TO LIVE FOR, TAKE NO HEED OF OUR STORIES.)

By this point about half the students at Yearly Meeting School in Providence, Rhode Island were not from Quaker families, with about one out of every five of the students who were Quakers coming to the school from outside New England. The board and tuition rate that was being charged of members of the New England Yearly Meeting was $100, while Quakers from outside New England were being charged $190, scholars only one of whose parents was a Quaker were being charged $190, and non-Quakers were being charged $300.

The School Committee having received $28,000.50 for land sold to the city of Providence for widening Hope Street and opening Lloyd Avenue from Hope Street to Arlington Avenue, and having sold other plots of land as well either to the city or to private parties, in this year a consent decree was sought, validating these transactions. The Rhode Island Supreme Court of course kindly obliged (such a consent degree did not, of course, free the school to do whatever it wanted with the moneys it had received).

This is what Providence looked like in this year:

READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT Providence Gas installed gas pipes into the buildings of the Butler Hospital for the Insane. After 29 consecutive 3. Edison was not an exceptionally dull person. There had for some time been a “phonautograph” device for the recording of sound waves in visible form –the voice of Abraham Lincoln in the White House had been recorded with such a device– but it had never once occurred to anyone that the result of such a recording might be “played back” for the re-creation of the original sound. It was not only Edison who was the victim of this failure of imagination but literally everyone in this society. 4. He considered that, used in conjunction with a clock, his device might serve to announce the hours of the day: “It is now three o’clock in the afternoon.” He also brainstormed that it might be useful in the teaching of proper spelling: “Aardvark: a-a-r-d-v-a-r- k, aardvark.” When someone proposed that his device might be able to record music, so that the same performance might be heard over and over again, he was deeply offended. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL years of financial deficits the hospital was able to post its first “surplus,” amounting to $742.

During the late 1870s, the inmate population at the Dexter Asylum across the street from the Moses Brown ASYLUM School had stabilized at around 100, where it would remain until the asylum’s closing. Living conditions, as depicted in early lists of rules and punishments, work records, and daily menus, were hardly desirable by present standards. Visitors were permitted only once every three weeks, male and female inmates were kept carefully segregated, the evening meal consisted merely of white bread and tea, and those found guilty of drinking, “immoral conduct,” “loud talking or disrespectful behavior,” or malingering to avoid work were subject to “confinement in bridewell [a jail cell] for a time not exceeding three days, and of being kept on short allowance of food.”

The grassy enclosure of about 9 1/12 acres located west of Dexter Street near High Street, which had been for years in service as a militia training field, was by this point no longer being required for such purposes.

Eli Whitney Blake, Hazard Professor of Physics at Brown University, had been fascinated by the development of this new instrument of communication, the telephone, although he was not of the sort who would pursue financial benefit, and had been conveying this enthusiasm to his students, many of whom had constructed their own receiver devices. Dr. William Francis Channing had also been attracted into this project. Although Alexander Graham Bell had on February 14th, 1876 submitted a crude working model to the US Patent Office and had secured a patent, his receiver device, which had been on exhibit at the Centennial Exhibition that summer, had turned out to be unwieldy, in that it weighed 10 pounds.

In late winter, or in the early spring of this year, at Professor Blake’s lodgings in the house of Rowland Hazard, 45 Williams Street in Providence, Rhode Island, there was a demonstration of the telephone: The wire was strung between the reception room, just within the front door, and the study at the other end of the long hall, with a telephone at either end. Ely happened to be listening at the receiver in the study, where Prof. Blake was completing his preparation, when he heard a familiar voice at the other end of the wire and said “My father has just come in, I hear his voice; were you expecting him?” Prof. Blake was dumbfounded and elated, for not even in their wildest flights of fancy had the scientists dreamed of the possibility of recognizing individual voices. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL Professor Blake and his students reduced the problem of the unwieldiness of the device by replacing the horseshoe magnet with a bar magnet, and found that in so doing they not only rendered the device more handy, but also improved the clarity of the communication. Their redesign would be termed a “butterstamp” because it resembled a kitchen tool that embosses a design into a block of butter.

Bob Newhart: “You hang this 10-pound wooden box on your living- room wall, and then you turn a crank while holding a butterstamp- shaped ‘receiver’ against your ear, while pointing a butterstamp-shaped ‘transmitter’ directly at your mouth? C’mon, Aleck, really? Really? You’re not just putting me on here, are you?”

CONTINGENCY ALTHOUGH VERY MANY OUTCOMES ARE OVERDETERMINED, WE TRUST THAT SOMETIMES WE ACTUALLY MAKE REAL CHOICES. “THIS IS THE ONLY WAY, WE SAY, BUT THERE ARE AS MANY WAYS AS THERE CAN BE DRAWN RADII FROM ONE CENTRE.”

January 31, Wednesday: Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the practicality of his box telephone by means of a phonecall placed from the home of Mayor Elisha Slade Converse in Malden, Massachusetts, to the offices of the mayor’s Boston Rubber Shoe Company on Converse Street in Boston.

February 12, Monday: A news dispatch was sent by telephone for the 1st time, from Salem, Massachusetts to Boston.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL April 2, Monday: A demonstration of the possibilities of long-distance music was presented in Steinway Hall, New- York by Elisha Gray, almost-inventor of the telephone. Pianist Frederick Boscovitz performed at the Western Union office in Philadelphia by way of Gray’s “telegraphic reed transmitter.” The signals, sent over a telegraph wire, activated 16 wooden tubes.

May: One morning the Providence, Rhode Island newspaper was noticed to feature a description of the telephone transmitter/receiver apparatus used by Alexander Graham Bell, with an illustration — and this produced great agitation in a science classroom at Brown University: ELECTRIC WALDEN Prof. Blake came into the lecture-room in a state of great excitement, a copy of the paper in his hand and addressed the class substantially as follows: “Gentlemen, you have seen the announcement of Professor Bell’s telephone in this morning’s paper. You are all familiar with the instrument; some of you have yourselves made them. I want to tell you that some time ago Prof. Bell came down from Boston to compare notes with Prof. Peirce, Dr. Channing and myself. He told us that he had mastered the principle of the telephone but had been unable to devise a receiver which was not too cumbrous for use. We showed him our receiver with which you are all familiar. I ask you to compare that with Prof. Bell’s as pictured in the paper today.” THE SCIENCE OF 1877

July 8, Sunday: Gardiner Greene Hubbard organized the Bell Telephone Company with himself as president, Thomas Sanders as treasurer, and Alexander Graham Bell as “Chief Electrician.”

July 11, Wednesday: The new President of the Bell Telephone Company, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, became a father- in-law as his deaf 19-year-old daughter Mabel Gardiner Hubbard got married with the Bell Telephone Company’s “Chief Electrician,” Alexander Graham Bell, at her family home “Hubbard House” on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her mother was Gertrude (McCurdy) Hubbard and she had been born on November 25th, 1857. The groom began to sign his name as “Alec” rather than “Aleck.”

This son-in-law’s major source of income would remain for the time being his teaching of deaf-mutes, since his telephone was not yet hugely profitable (however, as we now are aware, the Bell Telephone Company would subsequently evolve into the National Bell Telephone Company and then the American Bell Telephone Company, merging with smaller telephone companies along the way, and at the very end of the century, would become AT&T, which at times would be the world’s largest phone company).

After a 2-year honeymoon through Europe, this couple would make their main home at 1331 Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC. Because Alexander would be involved in 18 years of court litigation over who it was who actually held patent for the telephone device (more than 600 cases would be filed), and because he found the heat of Virginia summers to be unbearable, he would need to find a nice place to build a summer home away from the hubbub. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1878

January 28, Monday: The telegrapher George William Coy of New Haven, Connecticut made himself into 1st full- time telephone operator by devising a “switch-board.” This 1st commercial telephone exchange was initiated between New Haven and New-York — there would be 21 subscribers and the service provided by Mr. Coy would be available only during the day.

Coy’s board amounted to an array of “switch-pins” and “switch-plugs” made of carriage bolts, with wire from discarded bustles. He would patent his device: “Be it known that I, George W. Coy, of New Haven, in the county of New Haven and state of Connecticut, have invented a new Improvement in Electric Switches.” It would turn out that due to all the incessant making and breaking of connections, Coy’s switch-pins would wear out with bothersome frequency. He would be replacing his carriage bolts with hinged two-inch plates resembling a jackknife, “jack-knife switches” devised by Charles Scribner of the Western Electric Company.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE HISTORIAN TYPICALLY SUPPOSES NOW TO BE THE WHY OF THEN. THE REALITY IS VERY MUCH TO THE CONTRARY, FOR NOW IS NOT THE WHY OF THEN: INSTEAD, THEN WAS THE HOW OF NOW. ANOTHER WAY TO SAY THIS IS THAT HISTORIANS WHO ANTICIPATE OFFEND AGAINST REALITY. A HISTORY WRITTEN IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS AMOUNTS TO SPURIOUS MAKE- BELIEVE. TO DO A GOOD JOB OF RECORDING HISTORY, ONE MUST BECOME IGNORANT (OR FEIGN IGNORANCE) OF EVERYTHING THAT WE NOW KNOW TO HAVE FOLLOWED.

February 17, Sunday: The 1st telephone exchange in San Francisco opened, with 18 phones.

February 21, Thursday: The 1st telephone book was issued, by George William Coy in New Haven, Connecticut.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL March 14, Thursday: The phonograph and the telephone were exhibited in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall.

May 8, Wednesday: Elsie May Bell was born.

July 20, Saturday: The 1st telephone was introduced in Hawaii. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1879

Alexander Graham Bell invented the audiometer to measure hearing ability. This would lead to Bell’s name being used for the unit of sound measurement — the “decibel” consists of a tenth of a bell.

Alexander Graham Bell’s VOWEL THEORIES. NY: William Wood & Co. (20 pages). Survey of experimental research. Special attention is given to the harmonic fixed-pitch theory. Reprinted in American Journal of Otology, 1879, 1 and in Appendix of Bell’s LECTURES UPON THE MECHANISM OF SPEECH, 1906. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1880

April 17, Saturday: The American Bell Telephone Company was incorporated, replacing the National Bell Telephone Company.

THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE HISTORIAN TYPICALLY SUPPOSES NOW TO BE THE WHY OF THEN. THE REALITY IS VERY MUCH TO THE CONTRARY, FOR NOW IS NOT THE WHY OF THEN: INSTEAD, THEN WAS THE HOW OF NOW. ANOTHER WAY TO SAY THIS IS THAT HISTORIANS WHO ANTICIPATE OFFEND AGAINST REALITY. A HISTORY WRITTEN IN THE LIGHT OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS AMOUNTS TO SPURIOUS MAKE- BELIEVE. TO DO A GOOD JOB OF RECORDING HISTORY, ONE MUST BECOME IGNORANT (OR FEIGN IGNORANCE) OF EVERYTHING THAT WE NOW KNOW TO HAVE FOLLOWED.

September 24, Friday: Marion Hubbard Graham Bell (Fairchild) was born.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1881

August 2, Tuesday: Robert Louis Stevenson left Pitlochry, Scotland for Braemar, where he would remain for almost two months. There he would author the opening of “The Travelling Companion” (a “Doubles” story later destroyed) and begin work on THE SEA COOK (in 1883 this would appear in book form as TREASURE ISLAND).

Years earlier, while working on telephone technology, Alexander Graham Bell had accidentally discovered an electronic method of detecting hidden metal. As President James A. Garfield lay dying of an assassin’s bullet he put together a device, which he termed an “induction balance,” to discover the location of the slug. This would be at 1st unsuccessful, because on his initial visit to the White House in his haste he had assembled his device incorrectly, and then on his 2d visit, the President was lying on a mattress that contained steel wires throwing off the apparatus. The problem was exacerbated by an attending physician who would allow Bell to inspect only the right side of the torso when actually the bullet lay buried in the left side. By the time all these kinks were worked out the President had succumbed to sepsis, caused by this physician probing the wound with bare unwashed fingers. Bell’s science would be condemned in the press as quackery, and the fact that this famous inventor had just invented the metal detector would be more or less ignored.

August 15, Monday: Edward Bell was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1882

August: Professor Asa Gray traveled to Montréal for a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Nearly 20% of lambs die before weaning and 80% of those losses occur during the 1st 10 days. Such losses are critical to the profitability of a ranching operation. One of the critical points is enabling the lamb to take its 1st breath (get this, it’s not about the lamb being cute and cuddly). Alexander Graham Bell, and his daughters and attendants in Newport, Rhode Island, attempted to get a newborn lamb to take its 1st breath by means of an artificial respirator he had designed, a metal “Vacuum Jacket.” They took a photo. We don’t know whether the attempt was successful or unsuccessful, but he was on his way to designing the “Iron Lung” that would be so useful during our polio epidemic.

November 10, Friday: Alexander Graham Bell became a citizen of the United States of America. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1883

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Upon a method of teaching language to a very young congenitally deaf child.” American Annals of the Deaf, 28, 124-139. Reprinted in EDUCATION OF DEAF CHILDREN—ROYAL COMMISSION REPORT.

November 13, Tuesday: In a lecture before the National Academy of Science that would be published as MEMOIR UPON THE FORMATION OF A DEAF VAR IE TY OF THE HUMAN RACE (New Haven CT: National Academy of Science, 86 pages), Alexander Graham Bell promoted his own teaching technique, oralism, to the point at which he considered his opposition to any use of American Sign Language to amount to a matter of scientific and moral principle. His appeal was to hearing parents of deaf-mute children who needed for their impaired children to be more like them, and to proto-Nazis who considered that the human species must not be held back in its advance toward superiority and progress. He poured into the ready ears of both these groups the attitude that without being able to converse fully with hearing and speaking persons, such human defectives could never be successful in life. His belief in his oralism sprang from his belief in eugenics. He described the manner in which unions between persons who were both congenitally deaf was annually increasing the number of children born congenitally deaf. He feared that what we were doing by allowing congenitally deaf persons to share a language and culture of their own, was tolerating the generation of a race of defectives: Sexual selection is at work among the deaf and dumb.... Those who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriages of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.

The human species must not be held back in its progress out of compassion, or by an appeal to a principle of fairness. Permitting the teaching of American Sign Language, and permitting social clubs and programs for the deaf, and exposing young deaf children to deaf adults and administrators, was going to result in a constantly growing number of substandard people who could only be a greater and greater burden upon the productive normals of human society. It was therefore necessary that deaf children be assimilated into mainstream hearing society. You can’t just allow defectives to clump together. Since we should not simply sterilize them (a topic on which he did not discourse) or persuade them to refrain from producing offspring who may become burdens like themselves (another topic on which he did not discourse), we must enact legislation to forbid marriage to any person who is congenitally deaf, and in addition to forbid intermarriage among those “belonging to families containing more than one deaf-mute.” To become excellent, we must not be burdened!

November 17, Saturday: Robert Bell died while still an infant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1884

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Fallacies concerning the deaf.” American Annals of the Deaf, 29, 32-60. Reprinted in EDUCATION OF DEAF CHILDREN—ROYAL COMMISSION REPORT.

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race.” National Academy of Sciences, MEMOIRS, 2, 177-262. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Utility of action and gesture. The Educator, 5, 41-45.

Alexander Graham Bell & Gillett, Philip G.’s “Deaf classes in the public schools.” American Annals of the Deaf, 19, 312-325. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1885

The family of origin of the infant Harry S Truman relocated from Lamar, Missouri to a farm near Harrisonville.

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Is there a correlation between defects of the senses?” Science, 5, 127-129. Bell, a District of Columbia resident who had been finding the heat of the summers there quite unbearable, had read in Charles Dudley Warner’s BADDECK, AND THAT SORT OF THING (Houghton, Mifflin and Company), that Baddeck, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia was the sort of sleepy little town that he was dreaming of, one for which “every day is like a Sunday” and one in which one might hear Gaelic being spoken in the streets, He therefore selected “Crescent Grove” in Baddeck as the location for their summer home-away-from-home. Once his family was ensconced in this “Crescent Grove” summer home, Bell would find himself coveting a peninsula outside of town known as “Red Head” and would erect his “The Lodge” there, renaming the peninsula “Beinn Bhreagh” (Gaelic for “beautiful mountain”). These summer digs would grow and grow, ending up with 37 rooms and 11 fireplaces. He continued to experiment with his telephone apparatus while in Washington DC, where his family’s main home was, as well as while he was in residence at his summer estate on Beinn Bhreagh in Nova Scotia.

“HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1888

April 30, Monday: Count Kiyotaka Kuroda replaced Marquis Hirobumi Ito as prime minister of Japan.

Alexander Graham Bell posted from 1,336 Nineteenth Street in Washington DC a circular letter of inquiry to the superintendents and principals of all American and Canadian Schools for the Deaf. He asked about 5 specific matters, the 3d of which was “your opinion relating to the intermarriages of the deaf, and the inheritance of deafness by the offspring; and any statistics relating to the subject.” Pages 42 through 106 of the 195 pages of responses, published as FACTS AND OPINIONS RELATING TO THE DEAF FROM AMERICA (London: Spottiswoode & Co., New-street Square), related to that singular matter. Most of the institutions would not respond at all, and a number of the institutions that did respond provided factual material that could only by characterized as unhelpful to the eugenics cause: Frank Lamont Cole, now of Pawtucket, R.I., attended this school from February 1877 (at its founding) to June 1880. Was 13 when admitted. Became deaf from scarlet fever at 2½ years. After leaving school married a deaf-mute, Jennie Bragg, who was not a congenital. They had twins, who died soon after their birth. Mary Emily Bauer, now living at Green, R.I., married Frank Brown, congenital deaf-mute. They have 1 child, now nearly a year old, not deaf. Emily Bauer attended the R.I. School from April 1877 to May 1880.

Anna M. Black, Principal. However, listing these actual responses from people who knew the particular cases provided Bell with occasion to produce long letters from scientists with ample theories and ample attitudes, scientists of impressive position and impressive title such as Professor Edward D. Cope, Editor of the “American Naturalist” and Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Alpheus Hyatt, Professor in Harvard University, Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Bowditch, Professor in Harvard University, Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor William H. Brewer, Norton Professor of Agriculture in Yale University, Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Simon Newcomb, Superintendent of the United States “Nautical Almanac,” Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Professor W.K. Brooks, Professor of Morphology in John Hopkins’ [sic] University, Baltimore, Med. [sic] and Member of the National Academy of Sciences. All these evolution-theory folks agreed, really agreed, that Bell’s evolution- theory could not conceivably be tendentious: According to my view of evolution it is quite possible for a deaf or deaf-mute variety of man to arise and be perpetuated. It is not more improbable than that blind species of animals should arise and be perpetuated, a circumstance which has often occurred in the evolution of animals. ... It would be a very strange contradiction of experience and theory if a deaf-and-dumb race were not produced by continual intermarriage of persons afflicted in this way...... as I understand the doctrine of evolution, there can be no doubt that you are perfectly right...... In the light of present biological science, and of the breeder’s art, it is inconceivable that the process of selection of deaf HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL parents should not establish a deaf variety of the human race. ... That the continual intermarriage of persons possessing any peculiarity tends to make that peculiarity permanent is, I believe, a recognized law, constantly applied by breeders of new species in the animal and vegetable world. PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1890

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Professor A. Graham Bell’s studies of the deaf.” Science, 135-136.

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Deaf mutes,” Science 16, 358-359.

August/September: Alexander Graham Bell and his supporters formed the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1891

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Reading before writing,” American Annals of the Deaf, 36, 141-142.

March 6, Friday: Alexander Graham Bell addressed an audience of deaf-mutes at the Literary Society of Kendall Green in Washington DC on the topic of marriage. He spoke on such a topic, he told the members of his audience, because he was aware that no subject lay closer to their hearts, and also aware that “an idea has gone forth, and is very generally believed by the deaf of this country, that I want to prevent you from marrying as you choose, and that I have tried to pass a law to interfere with your marriages.” His next statement was “But, my friends, it is not true. I have never done such a thing, nor do I intend to.... I myself, the son of a deaf mother, have married a deaf wife.” This would appear in the same year in Science, volume 17, pages 160-163, and then in 1898 as MARRIAGE: AN ADDRESS TO THE DEAF. WITH AN APPENDIX UPON CONSANGUINEOUS MARRIAGES (Washington DC: Sanders Printing Office).

He was lying through his teeth, of course, lying like a trooper (or like a Nazi), for it was a matter of record that he had been repeatedly sponsoring eugenic legislation in Canada, the USA, and Great Britain to prevent pairs of congenital deaf/mutes from being able to marry. He in fact believed that because the deaf were defective human beings, it was entirely inappropriate for them to be allowed to have any social contact at all with one another — thus it was that he maintained that the ideal deaf school “would contain only one deaf child.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1892

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Testimony of Alexander Graham Bell.” In: Gordon, J.C. (Ed): THE EDUCATION OF DEAF CHILDREN, EVIDENCE OF E.M. GALLAUDET AND A.G. BELL PRESENTED TO THE ROYAL COMMISSION OF THE UNITED KINGDOM ON THE CONDITION OF THE BLIND, THE DEAF AND DUMB, ETC. WITH ACCOMPANYING PAPERS, POSTSCRIPTS, AND AN INDEX. Washington, DC: Volta Bureau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1893

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Upon the classification of methods of instructing the deaf.” American Annals of the Deaf, 38, 295-305.

Alexander Graham Bell’s ADDRESS UPON THE CONDITIONS OF ARTICULATION TEACHING IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS FOR THE DEAF (Boston: Nathan Sawyer and son).

May 8, Monday: Helen Keller would characterize her teacher Alexander Graham Bell as having dedicated his life to the penetration of that “inhuman silence which separates and estranges.” In this year, at the age of 13, she herself did the sod-breaking at a ceremony for the construction of a new building at Bell’s Volta Bureau in Georgetown, District of Columbia, a building dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the deaf.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1894

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Utility of signs.” Educator, 5, 3-23.

November 10, Saturday: Alexander Graham Bell addressed the Horace Mann School in Boston on the 25th anniversary of its opening: “Growth of the oral method of instructing the deaf” (this would be printed in Boston at the press of Rockwell and Churchill, in 23 pages). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1895

Alexander Graham Bell’s ENGLISH VISIBLE SPEECH IN TWELVE LESSONS. ILLUSTRATED. Printed for the author at the Western New York Institution for Deaf-Mutes, Rochester, N.Y. Published by The Volta Bureau, Washington DC, and sold by all Booksellers. Price Fifty Cents (94 pages). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1897

Alexander Graham Bell’s A FEW THOUGHTS CONCERNING PARENTS’ ASSOCIATIONS. AN ADDRESS DELIVERED UPON THE ORGANIZATION OF THE FIRST ASSOCIATION OF PARENTS OF DEAF CHILDREN. Washington DC: Sanders Printing Office.

March 10, Wednesday: Alexander Graham Bell, ready as always to rally to the cause of the defenseless, addressed the Committee on Humane Institutions concerning the recommendation of his Excellency Governor Lorrin Alanson Cooke of Connecticut, that “the appropriate of State funds be withdrawn from the Mystic Oral School, and that suitable provision for the State pupils therein be made elsewhere, as the State of Connecticut does not need two schools for the instruction of its deaf wards.” This would be printed in Washington DC by Gibson Brothers in an 8-page pamphlet as THE MYSTIC ORAL SCHOOL, AN ARGUMENT IN ITS FAVOR.

December 11, Saturday: Death of Gardiner Greene Hubbard. His son-in-law Alexander Graham Bell would be elected President of the National Geographic Society in his stead. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1898

Alexander Graham Bell’s THE QUESTION OF SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE UTILITY OF SIGNS IN THE INSTRUCTION OF THE DEAF (Washington D. C.: Sanders Printing Office). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1899

October: Alexander Graham Bell’s “Address of the president.” Association Review, 1, 67-82. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

20TH CENTURY

1900

Alexander Graham Bell’s A PHILANTHROPIST OF THE LAST CENTURY IDENTIFIED AS A BOSTON MAN (Worcester, Massachusetts: Charles Hamilton).

The person who had written in the Boston newspapers under the pen name “Philocophus” as a friend of the deaf-mutes, had been Francis Green (August 21, 1742, Boston-April 21, 1809, Medford), whose deaf-mute son Charles Green had been taught to speak, read, and write at Thomas Braidwood’s academy for the deaf in Edinburgh, Scotland. The father Francis Green had been educated in Halifax and Boston schools and in 1756 had been admitted to Harvard College, although in the following year his father obtained for him an ensign’s commission the 40th Regiment of Foot. He took part in 1758 in the siege of Louisbourg and remained on Cape Breton Island until during June 1760 his regiment moved to Québec to reinforce James Murray. In 1761 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and in 1762 he saw service in the West Indies. Then he spent several years as one of Major-General Thomas Gage’s secretaries, until in 1766 he sold his commission in order to go into the importing business with his father, who was in Halifax, becoming the Boston partner of that firm. His son Charles Green (1771-1787) had been discovered to be deaf at the age of 6 months. The father, happy with his son’s progress, published anonymously a pamphlet “Vox oculis subjecta” on the most curious and important art of imparting speech. Although this son accidentally drowned at an early age, the father persisted and would be partially responsible for the establishment of a charitable school for the deaf and dumb at Bermondsey near London. During the lead-up to the American Revolution he opposed the formation of committees of correspondence, and as a loyalist he was of course attacked by nativist mobs. During the Revolution he served as a captain for the Loyal American Associates. When the British army sailed from Boston to Halifax he sailed with them as a widower accompanied by 3 children and 3 servants. The following spring he went with the British army to New-York harbor where he engaged in the outfitting of vessels for privateering, losing 5 vessels to enemy action or shipwreck. In England he was provided with an annual pension of £100. Learning, however, that sentiments against loyalists had died down in New England, he sold his property in England and settled at Medford, Massachusetts as a marine insurance underwriter in Boston. In an unsuccessful attempt to get a school for deaf-mutes established in New England, he produced various essays under the pen name “Philocophus.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL October: The little family of Robert Frost and Elinor Miriam White Frost relocated to a farm near Derry, New Hampshire.

Elsie May Bell got married with Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, editor of the National Geographic Magazine.

Boer prisoners of war helped construct on their island prison of St. Helena a new road to West Rocks (thank you, guys): Roses are red, violets are blue, Infrastructure is nice, and so are you. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1906

Alexander Graham Bell’s LECTURES ON THE MECHANISM OF SPEECH. NY: Funk & Wagnalls. (First delivered as lectures to a meeting of the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. Contains treatment of vocal structures; descriptive analyses of sounds, his father Melville Bell’s visible speech symbols and an appended paper on vowel theories.

“Lectures upon the mechanism of speech: Review.” Nature, 75: 196.

“Special report upon the deaf, based on the returns of the twelfth census.” Volta Review, 1906, 8, 351-370; 442-469 (also 1907, 9, 336-356; 427-444; 533-545; 1908, 10, 36-47; 138-147; 240-255; 349-364; 455-464).

Bell, who had spent many years breeding sheep to have multiple nipples, would be a prominent member of a group formed during this year, the American Breeding Association’s Committee on Eugenics, a group that was proclaiming its mission to be “to investigate and report on heredity in the human race [and] to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.” Dr. David Starr Jordan, President of Leland Stanford University, would chair this group.

EUGENICS Can we formulate practical plans that might lead to the breeding of better men and better women? This is the great question we are called upon to consider.... We have statistics which indicate very clearly that consanguineous unions should not be contracted by defective persons ... there is considerable liability to the production of deaf offspring where a deaf-mute marries a blood relative, even in cases where the original deafness was not congenital.... In any large aggregation of HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL individuals the vast majority will be of the average type of the race. Some few will be markedly superior and some few inferior.... There would be a larger proportion of superior children among the offspring of the superior than of the average or inferior, and a larger proportion of inferior among the offspring of the inferior.... I am much struck by the thought that neither the quantity nor quality of the superior element would be increased by cutting off the inferior element from reproduction, and I begin to suspect that students of eugenics have overrated the importance of legislative interference with the marriages of the inferior. ...it is mainly through the use of thoroughbreds that we improve our stocks of domestic animals. In the case of men and women who are thoroughbred in respect to the point of superiority, it is obvious that their descendants, spreading out among the population and marrying into average or inferior families, would prove prepotent over their partners in marriage in affecting the offspring.... Why should not Congress provide for an ethnical survey of the people of the United States. We should have definite and reliable information concerning those foreign elements which are beneficial to our people and those which are harmful. ...the process of evolution should be carefully studied, and then controlled by suitable immigration laws tending to eliminate undesirable ethnical elements.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1907

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Speech-reading for the partially deaf.” American Annals of the Deaf. 52: 579-581.

THE MECHANISM OF SPEECH. NY: Funk and Wagnalls Co. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1908

February: Alexander Graham Bell’s “A few thoughts concerning eugenics.” National Geographic, 19, 119-132.

This was the speech Bell had made in the previous month before the American Breeders’ Association in Washington DC. Actually this magazine would run 3 articles on eugenics, 2 of which would be authored by Bell, who had spent many years breeding sheep to have multiple nipples, and had become a prominent member of the American Breeding Association’s Committee on Eugenics, established in 1906 “to investigate and report on heredity in the human race [and] to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.” EUGENICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1909

Alexander Graham Bell’s “French pronunciation in the Melville Bell symbols,” Volta Review, 11, 537-542. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1910

Alexander Graham Bell’s “A census of the able-bodied.” Volta Review, 12, 403-406.

“Notes of early life.” Volta Review, 12, 155-160. When I was a school-boy my father had a pupil, Benjamin Herdman, who was of about my own age. We became intimate and used to spend a good deal of time together. Benjamin’s father owned a large flour mill, known as Bell’s Mills, near Edinburgh. I was at the mills a good deal with my friend Benjamin, and, as boys will do, we were constantly getting into mischief. “Do Something Useful” One day Benjamin’s father called us into his office and gave us a good talking to. He wound up with the words, “Now, boys, why don’t you do something useful? I mildly asked him what we could do. It seems that at the moment his mind was occupied with some problem concerning his mill, and he picked up a handful of wheat and said, “If you could only take the husks off this wheat you would be of some help.” I said nothing at the time, but began to wonder whether some machine could not be devised that would remove the husks from the grains of wheat before milling. It seemed to me that brushing would accomplish this, so, through Benjamin Herdman, I quietly procured a sample of wheat and began to make experiments. I found no difficulty, by diligent application of a nail-brush, in cleaning the wheat as desired. It then occurred to me that at Bell’s Mills they already had a rotating machine, used for other purposes, that should do the business. By dumping the wheat into this machine it would be paddled round and would be thrown against the circumference of the machine, which was provided with brushes or something rough that I thought would clean the wheat as thoroughly as the nail- brush had done. Armed with the sample of wheat I had cleaned, Benjamin and I repaired to Mr. Herdman’s office and explained the idea to him. He seemed struck with the idea and immediately ordered the experiment to be tried. It turned out to be a success, and I have the impression that this method of cleaning wheat was permanently adopted in Bell’s Mills. The Herdmans subsequently acquired the Haymarket Mills, in Edinburgh, which still belong to the family. Mr. John Herdman, a son of the old gentleman (who is no longer living), remembers the experiment, and can tell better than I what practical results ensued. So far as I remember, Mr. Herdman’s injunction to “do something useful” was my first incentive to invention, and the method of cleaning wheat the first fruits. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1912

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Reminiscences of early days of speech teaching.” Volta Review, 14, 579-581.

July 29, Monday: Emperor Mutsuhito of Japan died after a reign of 45 years and was succeeded by his son, Yoshihito.

Fighting began between Liberals and disaffected Conservatives on one side against the Conservative government of Nicaraguan President Adolfo Díaz. The US Minister to the country, George Weitzel, personally led a reorganization of the Managua police force to help meet the threat.

This was the final day of the First International Eugenics Congress, at the Hotel Cecil in London. The congress had been organized by the British Eugenics Education Society and was dedicated to Francis Galton, the eugenics fraud who had died during the previous year. Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and a relative of Galton, had presided. The 5-day meeting had assembled about 400 dignitaries, such as Winston Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, and Lord Alverstone, the Chief Justice, Lord Balfour, the ambassadors of Norway, Greece, and France, etc. In his opening address Darwin had spoken bravely about the fact that the introduction of principles of better breeding procedures for humans was going to require moral courage. An exhibit sponsored by the American Breeders’ Association had demonstrated the incidence of hereditary defects in human pedigrees. A report by Bleeker van Wagenen had brought the world up to date about improvements in American sterilization laws. Mr. Van Wagenen had spoken bravely about the need for sterilization to be compulsory –no matter how unpleasant a thought this was– in order to eliminate “defective germ-plasm.” In his final address on this day, Major Darwin extolled eugenics as the practical application of the principle of evolution. For the Second International Eugenics Congress, in 1921 in New York City, the American eugenicist Alexander Graham Bell would be honorary president. PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1913

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Graphical studies of marriages of the deaf,” Volta Review, 15, 146-152; 196-203; 230-238; 280-287; 322-329; 366-373, 408-415. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1914

Alexander Graham Bell’s “The Melville Bell symbols; line-writing form.” Volta Review, 16, 266-270, 477- 485, 569-576, 723, 730.

“Suggestions concerning the formation of a local association of parents of deaf children,” Volta Review, 16, 750-751.

“Vocal physiology, the principles of speech, etc.” Volta Review, 16, 66-78.

“Principles of speech and dictionary of sounds.” Volta Review, 16, 65-78; 128-142, 217-227; 303-308; 403- 408; 486-488; 555-558; 667-670;731-735; 830-838 (1915, 17, 31-40; 79-80; 116-118; 161-163; 204-206; 248- 249; 283-292; 335-336; 405-420; 494-504). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1915

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Utility of action and gesture.” Volta Review, 17, 13-18. (reprinted from The Educator, Vol 5, 41-44, May 1884).

“Phonetic syllabification,” Volta Review, 17, 155-158.

January 25, Monday: Alexander Graham Bell effected the 1st transcontinental telephone communication, from Bell in New York to a collection of officials in San Francisco. Among those receiving this historic call, Bell’s former assistant Thomas Augustus Watson had made himself available.

Bell also placed the 1st trans-Atlantic phonecall.

Two Songs and La lune blanche, both for solo voice and orchestra by Frederick Delius to words of Verlaine, were performed for the initial time, at Grafton Galleries.

To Thee! America for chorus and orchestra by Henry F. Gilbert to words of Manly was performed for the initial time, in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

Madame Sans-Gêne, an opera by Umberto Giordano to words of Simoni after Sardou and Moreau, was performed for the initial time, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Germany introduced bread cards. WORLD WAR I

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

Alexander Graham Bell “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1916

Alexander Graham Bell’s “Auto-education continued in the primary school, Volta Review, 18, 135-142. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1917

October 10, Wednesday: Alexander Graham Bell delivered a paper at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts on that institution’s 50th anniversary, that would be printed as THE GROWTH OF THE ORAL METHOD IN AMERICA (Boston, 33 pages). HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1920

November/December: Alexander Graham Bell’s “Is race suicide possible?” The Journal of Heredity, XI, #8, 340. After the fall of the Roman Empire there was a great religious revival among the nations. The Middle Ages saw Europe filled with monasteries and nunneries, where enormous numbers of people took vows of celibacy, and renounced all home and family ties. Even outside of the religious houses the celibate life was everywhere held up as the ideal one to be followed by the best and purest elements of the population. Instead of helping the church this produced the very opposite effect, and actually paved the way for the Reformation! ...where the best and noblest led celibate lives, they left no descendants behind them to inherit their virtues, whereas the worst elements of the population continued to multiply without restriction. It is now felt that the interests of the race demand that the best should marry and have large families; and that any restrictions upon reproduction should apply to the worst rather than to the best. ... The only hope of producing higher and better types of men and women lies in the multiplication of the better elements of the population. There is now a great fear of what people call “race suicide” in America. Foreign-born parents are begetting more offspring than American. The United States to-day is in a critical position. Its birth-rate is declining and the tendency to avoid maternity is growing; the immigrant races are increasing at a much greater rate than our own. The only solution for a true American race lies in the restriction of immigration. The desire to avoid maternity is a characteristic associated with lack of offspring, and cannot therefore go on increasing indefinitely in a community. So long as some people (no matter how small the percentage may be) desire children and have them, complete race suicide is impossible. These people would pass on the characteristic of desire for children while those who are indifferent would restrict themselves and thus eliminate this characteristic from the race. In several generations’ time, the American race would be composed almost totally of those people who desire progeny, the opposite type having eliminated itself by its very character. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1921

September 25, Sunday-27, Tuesday: The Second International Eugenics Congress met at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, with Henry Fairfield Osborn presiding. Alexander Graham Bell was honorary president and the US Department of State mailed invitations around the world. Under American leadership and dominance –41 out of 53 scientific papers– the work of the eugenicists disrupted by World War I in Europe needed to resume. Delegates participated not only from Europe and North America, but also from Latin America (Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Uruguay), and Asia (Japan, India, Siam). The honored guest speaker, Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, spoke in favor of eugenic measures that cried out to be now taken, such as “elimination of the unfit” and discouragement of births among the “ill- endowed,” accompanied by a program to encourage increased numbers of infants among the “well-endowed.”

PROTO-NAZISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1922

August 2, Wednesday: Fascist gangs in Ancona destroyed all buildings occupied by socialists. This would be repeated in Livorno and Genoa.

In the early morning, Alexander Graham Bell, at the age of 75, was on his death bed on his estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia due to complications of diabetes. The physician summoned Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell to his side. Mabel, who had become totally deaf at the age of 5 after a bout with scarlet fever but because she had already learned to speak had it would appear not totally lost that ability, said “Aleck, please don’t leave me!” and because he was unable to speak, he spelled “no” in her hand as he slipped away. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1923

January 2, Tuesday: In response to the events of the previous day, armed white men began to gather in Sumner near the black community of Rosewood, Florida.

Mabel Gardiner Hubbard was grief-stricken at the death of her husband Alexander Graham Bell, and returned to Washington DC to reside with a family member. She survived for only 5 additional months, succumbing at age 65 to what her family suspects to have been cancer of the pancreas.

Aleck had wanted to be buried at the location he most loved, at the very top of his Beinn Bhreagh estate in Baddeck, Nova Scotia. Mabel’s wish had been to be buried at her husband’s side. The body was therefore cremated in Washington DC and buried a year later, on the day of the year on which her husband had been buried. For all their lives together, 5PM had been their special time, so the burial ceremony was arranged to take place at that hour. HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

1932

August 22, Monday-23, Tuesday, 1932: The Third International Eugenics Congress took place at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, dedicated to Mary Williamson Averell who had provided significant financial support, and presided over by Charles Davenport. Henry Fairfield Osborn’s address emphasized birth selection over birth control as the method to better the offspring. F. Ramos from Cuba proposed that immigrants should be carefully checked for harmful traits, and suggested deportations of their descendants if inadmissible traits would become later apparent. Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, now 88 years old, was unable to attend but sent a report presented by Ronald Fisher predicting the doom of civilization unless adequate eugenic steps were taken. The congress would publish “A Decade of Progress in Eugenics” in SCIENTIFIC PAPERS OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EUGENICS. However, for obvious reasons, although there would be international meetings in 1934 and 1936 there would never be a Fourth International Eugenics Congress. PROTO-NAZISM

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2018. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: February 25, 2018 HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.