In the spring of 1876, just before the centennial of the United States, the Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell patented an apparatus for “transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically … causing electrical undulations”. A century and a half later, there is an argument to be made that Bell’s device is one of the most transformative inventions in human history.
Yet the 29-year-old Bell we meet in Sarah Marsh’s engaging first novel is a man whose passion for invention was very much secondary to his other great project: teaching deaf people to speak. Graham’s mother and his wife, Mabel, were both deaf, and Bell was committed to integrating deaf people into hearing society through “oralism”, which meant not only teaching them to make speech by learning how to move their mouths by rote, but also forbidding them to use any kind of sign language. Katie Booth’s 2021 biography of Bell, The Invention of Miracles, was a passionate assault on Bell’s cause.
