Before his most famous invention, the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell taught his dog Trouve to talk to help benefit the deaf.
Alexander Graham Bell's father was a teacher of the deaf and invented Visible Speech, a writing system to help deaf students learn spoken language. The symbolic notations were based on the shape and movement of the lips and tongue. Bell was intrigued with his father's work and felt it could be used as an aide to teach the deaf to speak. He felt if he could get a deaf person to emit a continuous sound on cue, they could then shape the tone by moving the tongue and lips into words. To test this theory, he used his pet dog, a Skye terrier named Trouve. He figured if he could teach his dog to speak, he could definitely teach a deaf person to speak.
The first thing Bell had to teach Trouve was to growl on cue. He taught him this fairly quickly with the help of treats. Next he had to teach him to sit up on his hind legs and emit a continuous growl so he could easily shape the dog's mouth (using his father's method) to produce sounds. After many treats, Bell taught Trouve to say "Mama" clearly and later "How are you, Grandmama?" which sounded "ow ah oo, ga-ma-ma." Even though, according to Bell, "the dog became quite fond of his articulation lessons," he could not get Trouve to talk just on his own. "I made many attempts, though without success, to cause him to produce the effects without manipulation. He took a bread-and-butter interest in the experiments, but was never able, alone, to do anything but growl."
Although Bell had no experience or prior knowledge of teaching the deaf, he was given the chance to work with children in a small school for deaf children in South Kensington, London. Eventually, he opened his own school. According to his journal, he was able to teach a deaf student to utter complete and intelligible sentences after a few lessons. His work impressed the wealthy parents of two of his students so much that they helped financially support Bell's other pursuits like the telephone.
