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  A childhood illness left Bell’s mother mostly deaf and reliant on an ear trumpet to hear anything. Young Alexander would speak close to his mother’s forehead so she could feel the vibrations of his voice. Bell’s father and grandfather were both distinguished speech therapists, and from a young age the future inventor joined in the family business. Bell became a voice teach er and worked with his father, who developed Visible Speech, a written system of symbols that instructed the deaf to pronounce sounds. In 1873 he became a professor of vocal physiology at Boston University where he met his future wife, Mabel Hubbard, a student 10 years his junior who had completely lost her hearing from a bout of scarlet fever. Living and working with the hearing impaired sparked Bell’s interest in the principles of acoustics and his experiments in transmitting sound waves over wires.

Charles Babbage  designed a fully functional mechanical computer called the  Analytical Engine  in 1837. It used gigantic stacks of cogs for memory (capable of storing 1,000 numbers to 40 decimal places), a CPU-like computing engine developed using gears and wheels, a printer (numbers only), a plotter (for graphics...ish), and even a programming language ( Ada Lovelace  wrote the first program, and the system used punched cards for program input). The Analytical Engine was the first  Turing complete  design for a computer, this effectively meant it was the first modern computer, but it was designed more than a hundred years before modern computers like  ENIAC . The only trouble is that Babbage's grand machine was never built. A partial prototype was made, but the grand scale of the Analytical Engine was never realized, and Babbage died without seeing it constructed.  

As he grew older, Edison became completely deaf in one ear and partly deaf in the other. A childhood case of scarlet fever might have been the cause. “Earache came first, then deafness, and this deafness increased until at the theatre I could only hear a few words now and then,” Edison wrote. Yet he felt that his hearing problems gave him a career advantage: They made it easier for the inventor to concentrate on his work without aural distractions. “My deafness has not been handicap, but a help to me,” he claimed.