Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787 to 1851) was an American educator who, with Laurent Clerc and Mason Cogswell, co-founded the first permanent institution for the education of the deaf in North America and became its first principal. It opened on April 15, 1817 as the Connecticut Asylum at Hartford for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons and is now known as the American School for the Deaf. He graduated from Yale University at seventeen with highest honors and later completed a course at Andover Theological Seminary. After meeting Alice Cogswell, the deaf nine-year-old daughter of a neighbor, in 1814, he was asked in 1815 to travel to Europe to study methods of teaching deaf students. Unimpressed with the oral method, he studied the manual method under the Abbe Sicard in Paris, learned sign language from Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc, and persuaded Clerc to return with him to America to raise funds for the school in Hartford.