1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Braidwood, Thomas

BRAIDWOOD, THOMAS (1715–1806), British teacher of the deaf and dumb, was born in Scotland in 1715, and educated at Edinburgh University. He became a school teacher, and in 1760 opened in Edinburgh, with one pupil, the first school in Great Britain for the deaf and dumb, following the system of Dr John Wallis, described in Philosophical Transactions nearly a hundred years before. This school was the model for all of the early English institutions of the kind. Dr Johnson visited it in 1773, and describes it as “a subject of philosophical curiosity . . . which no other city has to show,” and Braidwood’s dozen pupils as able “to hear with the eye.” In 1783 Braidwood moved to Hackney, where he died on the 24th of October 1806.