Laurent Clerc

Laurent Clerc was born in Paris, France in 1785. At the age of one, he fell out of a chair and suffered the loss of his sense of hearing. Hitting his head on the floor, left him with a scar on his face that became sort of a name for him when he would slide his fingers down his face. Despite the scar, he always had the belief that he was born deaf, also without a sense of smell.

At the age of twelve his uncle decided to take him to the Paris School for the Deaf. This school was the first time he was introduced to sign language.
Laurent Clerc could not speak before he came to this school, but here he was taught from a speech teacher that he was not fond of. Sometimes while pronouncing words he would accidentally mix up the d's and t's. His speech teacher would smack him in the face for this. Eventually Clerc was quit emotionally scarred from these smacking incidents and his speech class that he vowed to never use his voice again, and he never did. Regardless of what had happened at the school, Clerc stayed at the school and taught other students first as a tutor during 1805, and eventually became a teacher in
1806.
Clerc's coming to America would make him one of the most prominent deaf men in our history. Arriving in New York in 1817, along with Gallaudet,
Clerc founded the first American School for the Deaf, located in Hartford,
Connecticut. As the first deaf teacher in America, Clerc taught thirty-one