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This chapter argues that George Eliot recognized the advent of an age defined by new emphases on and understandings of the capacity for listening. This argument suggests that Victorian science — especially the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers — at first gave substance and form to sounds that had once seemed indefinite and immaterial, and Victorian technology then fundamentally destabilized aural communication. Coming at the end of a series of works that in their breadth of perception still leave many readers in silent awe, the so-called post-realist Daniel Deronda confronts with singular tenacity the question of not only what the later Victorian novel might possibly have left to say, but also how it might say it. Eliot finds a partial answer in thematizing the exchange of speech and sound itself. Deronda acknowledges at once the frustrating challenges and newly charged power of contact in an era heralding amplified sounds, wired voices, and bottled talk.

What Alexander Graham Bell considered his most important, if least known, invention, the ear phonautograph, was designed to “bring the deaf to speech.” This chapter links Derrida’s suggestion that invention has become production to Marx’s blurring of reproduction-production and to Bell’s eugenics initiatives designed to eliminate reproduction between deaf mutes who, like foreigners, suffered from “broken speech.”

This chapter describes Deaf family life and marriage on Martha's Vineyard, with a view to contrasting it to Henniker. Genealogies for major families with Deaf members are presented, starting with that of Thomas Brown's wife, Mary Smith. She is representative of numerous Deaf young men and women who grew up on the Vineyard, attended the American Asylum for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, married a Deaf schoolmate and created a family with Deaf and hearing children. Mary Smith_D is also representative in that she could trace her ancestry to just a few early English settlers. By the 1840s, nearly everyone on the Vineyard had two or more ancestors from Kent, in England. The sign language on the Vineyard may have come from there as well. Alexander Graham Bell identified seventy-two Deaf individuals who had been born on the Vineyard or whose ancestors came from the Vineyard.

Cinema is considered through electromagnetic propagation in projected and transmitted light in Alexander Graham Bell’s attempt to listen to storms on the sun using his photophone; through the “head-light child” of automobile headlights and related comet imagery by Marcel Duchamp, including his “tonsure”; and in Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone and James Turrell’s Roden Crater, in the context of his ideas about electromagnetism.

Sounds in telephone lines were heard “wirelessly” by inductive “leakage” from one line to another and through circuits returned through the earth, as well as by the reception of electromagnetic waves when lines functioned as unwitting antennas. Examples of “inductive radio” are given, including transmissions of Elisha Gray’s early “musical telephone” heard on telegraph lines other than the ones intended, and similar telephone concerts using Bell’s device. Among the noises routinely heard on the telephone were forms of whistlers and other “musical atmospherics” that were studied scientifically after signal corps operators heard them during World War 1 in field telephones and direction-finding antennas. The musical aesthetics of whistler research to the 1960s are discussed.

Several attempts at inventing the telephone are described, particularly the crucial contribution of Alexander Graham Bell. The invention was offered to Western Union but its managing director declined to accept the offer on the basis that he saw no future for the telephone. The head of the British Post Office, William Preece, had similar views. He believed that the availability of messenger boys will make the telephone unnecessary. Women’s employment prospects improved with the emergence of telephone exchanges. The growth in the telephone networks is shown graphically. Telephone broadcasting worked in Budapest for nearly four decades including the First World War.

A number of memorials attest to the fact that solving practical problems has been in the forefront of science in the United States. The innovations of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Fulton, John Ericsson, Samuel Morse, Nikola Tesla, the Wright brothers, and others had immediate benefits for society. The discoveries of Josiah Willard Gibbs, Clinton Davisson, and Albert Michelson represent fundamental science. There are memorabilia to world-renowned discoverers in electricity and telecommunication. The progress in astronomy and space research, as well as in developing all means of transportation and gems of architecture, such as New York’s popular museums and bridges, are all memorials to scientists, technologists, and innovators.

This chapter uses the lives of Caroline and Jane Kenney to offer new insights into the relationship between suffrage, feminism, and educational reform. While the links between the teaching profession, the women’s movement, and the suffrage campaign have long been recognized, teachers’ interests in suffrage are usually framed in terms of demands for equal pay, workplace rights, and professional status. This chapter instead explores the Kenney sisters’ interests in the purpose and meaning of education, especially for women, through their commitment to pedagogical reform and innovative education. It shows how their access to a network of reformers, gained through their suffrage work and connections, was one of their most important resources, allowing them to pursue their interests across national boundaries. Their careers suggest some of the possibilities open to feminist teachers who were committed to personal, professional, and political advancement, and who had the resources and opportunities to pursue their goals.