10 BLIND/DEAF PEOPLE WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

Galileo Galilei - (15 February 1564 - 8 January 1642) Galileo Galilei was a Tuscan (Italian)

astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher being greatly responsible for the

scientific revolution. Some of his accomplishments include improvements to the

telescope, accelerated motion and astronomical observations. Galileo was the first to

discover the four largest satellites of Jupiter which were named the Galilean moons

in his honor. Galileo had also improved compass design and eventually opposed

the geocentric view. His sight started to deteriorate at the age of 68 years old

and eventually leaded to complete blindness.

Thomas Edison - Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 - October 18, 1931) was an American

inventor of Dutch origin and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced

life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb. In school, the

young Edison's mind often wandered. He was noted to be terrible at mathematics, unable

to focus, and had difficulty with words and speech. This ended Edison's three months of

official schooling. The cause of Edison's deafness has been attributed to a bout of scarlet

fever during childhood and recurring untreated middle ear infections.

Laurent Clerc- (26 December 1785 - 18 July 1869) Laurant Clerc was called "The Apostle

of the deaf in America" and "The Father of the Deaf" by generations of American deaf people.

With Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, he co-founded the first school for the deaf in North America,

the Hartford Asylum for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb on April 15,

1817 in the old Bennet's City Hotel, Hartford, Connecticut. Clerc's name sign would become

the best known and most recognizable name sign in American deaf history and Clerc

became the most renowned deaf person in American history.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt - (January 30, 1882 -April 12, 1945) Franklin Delano

Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States of America. Roosevelt had

several disabilities including vision impairment. He made his mark in Americ an

Politics and was the 32nd President of the United States of America. He was

one of the most popular presidents in history. He earned a degree from the

Harvard College and was a corporate lawyer after earning a degree from

the Columbia Law School.

William Elsworth - Dummy Hoy - (May 23, 1862 - December 15, 1961) was an

American center fielder in Major League Baseball who played for several teams from

1888 to 1902, most notably the Cincinnati Reds and two Washington, D.C. franchises.

He is noted for being the most accomplished deaf player in major league history, and is

credited by some sources with causing the establishment of signals for safe and out calls.

Hoy became deaf after suffering from meningitis at age three, and went on to graduate

from the Ohio State School for the Deaf in Columbus as class valedictorian. Hoy became

the third deaf player in the major leagues, after pitcher Ed Dundon and catcher Tom

Lynch. Hoy also worked as an executive with Goodyear after supervising hundreds of

deaf workers during World War I. In 1951 he was the first deaf athlete elected to

membership in the American Athletic Association of the Deaf Hall of Fame.

Marla Runyan - (Born January 4, 1969) Marla Runyan is a marathon runner who is legally

blind. She is the three-time national champion in the women's 5.000 meter run. Runyan

was the first legally blind athlete to compete in the Olympics Games. She placed eighth in

the 1,500-meter in the 2000 Sydney Olympics making it the highest finish by an American

woman in that event. In 2002 she finished as the top American at the 2002 New York City

Marathon to post the second-fastest debut time ever by an American woman.

Heather Whitestone McCallum- (born February 24, 1973) Heather is a beauty queen who was the first deaf Miss America title holder, having lost her hearing at the age of eighteen

months. Whitestone represented Alabama at the 1995 Miss America pageant held in

Atlantic City, New Jersey. Despite being profoundly deaf, she performed ballet en pointe to the song "Via Dolorosa"as her talent, winning the preliminary talent competition, as well as the preliminary swimsuit competition.

Linda Bove - (born November 30, 1945) is a deaf American actress who played the part

of Linda the Librarian on the children's television program Sesame Street from 1971 to

2003. Bove has introduced thousands of children to sign language and issues

surrounding the Deaf Community. Her role as Linda on Sesame Street is currently the

longest recurring role in television history for a deaf person. Bove attended Gallaudet

University. She has been married to Ed Waterstreet since 1970. Like Bove, Waterstreet

is also deaf. He also performed with the National Theater of the Deaf.

Gertrude Ederle- (October 23, 1906 - November 30, 2003) Gertrude was an American

competitive swimmer. In 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English

Channel. She trained at the Women's Swimming Association, which produced such

competitors as Eleanor Holm and Esther Williams. She joined the club when she was

only fifteen. From this time Gertrude began to break and establish more amateur

records than any other woman in the world. Ederle had poor hearing since

childhood due to measles, and by the 1940s she was completely deaf. She spent

the rest of her life teaching swimming to deaf children.

Sabriye Tenberken - (born 1970) is a German socialworker and

co-founder of the organisation Braille Without Borders. Sabriye

became gradually visually impaired and completely blind by the age

of thirteen due to retinal disease. She studied Central Asian Studies at

Bonn University. In addition to Mongolian and modern Chinese, she

studied modern and classical Tibetan in combination with Sociology and

Philosophy. As no blind student had ever before ventured to enroll in this

kind of studies, she could not fall back on the experience of previous students,so she developed her own

methods of studying her course of studying. It was thus that a Tibetan Braille script for the blind was

developed in 1992, which became the official script for the blind in Tibet. In 1997, Sabriye travelled to Tibet

alone in order to assess the situation of the blind there. Returning in 1998, she founded the Centre for the

Blind in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to educate blind people. Before, the blind had not been able to attend

school.

SOURCE: http://www.disabled-world.com/artman/publish/famous-deaf.shtml