Bell Canada
With a deaf wife and mother, it was Alexander Graham Bell’s research into hearing devices that would profoundly influence his invention of the telephone. But he also had eugenicist leanings, particularly his fear that the hearing impaired would have children and form a kind of deaf fifth column, complete with their own secret language. Although Bell never considered mandatory controls on human breeding, he did press for governments to take steps against what he called the “Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.”
