Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell's involvement with the Horace Mann School for the Deaf began in 1871, when he came to instruct Horace Mann teachers in "Visible Speech," a system of visualizing articulated language invented by his father, Alexander Melville Bell. Children who are not deaf or hard of hearing typically learn to speak by repeating sounds that they hear. Visible Speech sought to provide an alternative way to learn speech to the deaf, by showing how the throat, tongue and lips can be positioned to produce intended sounds and words.
Alexander Graham Bell remained committed to the Horace Mann School, and to deaf education, throughout his life. Mabel Ellery Adam's remembrances of him, in "A Few Memories of Alexander Graham Bell," note that he would stop in to the school when he could. She also writes that he used the $10,000 he had earned as a prize for the invention of the telephone to establish the Volta Bureau, an organization for the benefit of the deaf.