TTY and TTY Relay Services

The invention of the telephone in the late 1800's was heralded by most people. However, people who are deaf or hard of hearing had difficulty or could not use the telephone at all. For generations, deaf and hard of hearing people had to depend on hearing family members, friends, and neighbors to make telephone calls – to their doctors, children’s schools, and other necessary contacts.

Robert Weitbrecht, a deaf scientist, developed the teletypewriter (TTY) in the 1960s. With the invention of the acoustic coupler (which holds the telephone handset receiver) and the distribution of recycled teletype machines, deaf and hard of hearing people were able to call each other directly using these devices. In the late 1970's and through the 1980's, much smaller and compact versions of the TTY were manufactured, marketed, and made available through state TTY equipment distribution programs.

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The Spanish National Deaf School: Portraits from the Nineteenth Century

I do, however, use the word deaf-mute to translate the Spanish sordomudo, which was common throughout the 1800s. Today the term sordomudo is rejected by the Spanish Deaf community and its supporters (as is its English counterpart deaf-mute in the United States), although it may still be employed by Spaniards unaware of—or indifferent to—its pejorative connotations. I have chosen to use the term deaf-mute (and occasionally mute) for the sake of historical accuracy; no offense should be taken and no negative implications are intended.
Two themes appear and reappear throughout this work: the nineteenth- century construction of deafness and the status of Spanish Sign Language and its use in the classroom (always key issues in deaf education). The latter topic is of particular interest in light of Lane’s hypothesis on the role of deaf teachers in educating deaf children. According to Lane, “If the profession of deaf education acknowledged that deaf children have a language and that manual language is the best way to educate these children, then deaf adults would once again enter the profession (as they did in the [nineteenth] century), and hearing people would lose their monopoly.”16 The lessons of Spanish Deaf history call this assertion into question, however, because during the 1800s, educators at the Madrid school recognized that their pupils had a language and championed its use as a medium of instruction; but even so, for the better part of the century, they did not allow deaf adults to enter the profession.

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DEAF EDUCATION

Is signing the best method, or speech and speechreading. And what about cued speech (a visual representation of sound)? How did these methods come to be what was there history?
In the 1800's Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet went to England in order to find a teaching method to teach deaf students. First he visited the Braidwood School who's main methods were oral, but the school refused to share the exact methods they used. Thomas, however, soon met a person who taught the deaf, Roche Amboise Sicard, who was on tour demonstrating how he taught. Sicard used a method of signing. When Gallaudet came back he created the Hartford School now known as the American School of the Deaf. Sign language at that point was the main way of teaching.
Deaf schools began to spread due to the number of students becoming deaf teachers. Then in 1864 The National Deaf Mute College was established by Congress. This is now Gallaudet University. The Conference of Milan occurred shortly after the college was established bringing into question which method of communicating was most appropriate in teaching the deaf. Most countries except the United States used all oral methods leading to a conclusion that the oral method was better.

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