300-Year-Old Manual Reveals Early Attempts to Teach Deaf to Speak

A 300-year-old, leather-bound instruction manual contains some of the earliest examples of attempts to teach the deaf to communicate.

The manual belonged to Alexander Popham, a deaf teenager from a noble English family who was taught to speak in the 1660s. The leather-bound notebook was discovered in 2008 at a stately English manor called Littlecote House.

The finding suggests that one of the boy's tutors, John Wallis, was a few hundred years ahead of his time in understanding that deaf people needed their own language to communicate, said linguist David Cram of the University of Oxford.

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