Thomas Braidwood

Thomas Braidwood (1715 to 1806) was a Scottish educator, significant in the history of deaf education, who founded Britain's first school for the deaf. Born at Hillhead Farm, Covington, South Lanarkshire, he first established himself as a writing teacher, instructing the children of the wealthy at his home in the Canongate in Edinburgh. In 1760 he accepted his first deaf pupil, Charles Shirreff, later a painter of portrait miniatures, and changed his vocation from teaching hearing pupils to teaching the deaf, renaming his building Braidwood's Academy for the Deaf and Dumb, the first school of its kind in Britain. He developed a combined system of educating deaf students that included a form of sign language, the study of articulation and lip reading, which came to be known as the English method; its early use of sign language was a forerunner of British Sign Language. In 1783 he moved to Hackney in London and established the Braidwood Academy for the Deaf and Dumb there, where his nephew Joseph Watson began working with him in 1784.