Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Class of 1805 (1787-1851). Gallaudet became interested in education of the deaf in his late twenties because of Alice Cogswell, a neighbor’s nine-year-old deaf child. She was illiterate, but on their first meeting, he taught her how to spell two words: “hat” and “Alice." No schools or even methods for teaching the deaf existed in the United States at the time, so, with the support of Alice’s father, Gallaudet studied in England and France. There he learned sign language and the most advanced pedagogical ideas of deaf educators. In 1816 he returned to the United States, and in 1817 he opened the country’s first school for the deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut. (Alice enrolled as the first student.) For the next half-century, this school trained most instructors of the deaf in the United States.

After Gallaudet retired from the school in 1830, he served briefly at New York University as the country’s first professor in the philosophy of education. Gallaudet University was named after him in 1954. His 20-cent stamp was issued in 1983.