Famous people with Hearing Impairment

Beethoven

Beethoven was as we know a great source of confidence for himself and for others, being able to create music and play music even after being completely deaf is by itself quite a miracle. He conquered his disability and led himself to being one of the greatest musicians of all time. By the time Beethoven was 28 he began to notice a hearing loss. At first it was slight. He couldn't hear the church bells ringing in the distance. As he got older his hearing loss worsened. By the time he was 50 he was completely deaf. If there was one thing that was affecting his struggle to succeed it was not only being deaf, but having to fight all the emotions that he felt inside when he had to turn around to look at the audience applause because he could not hear. How strange that one of the world's greatest composers could not hear his own music! Even more amazing is that he wrote some of the world's greatest music even though he could not hear a note of it. Beethoven was determined not to be ruined by his deafness, and by 1812 he had completed symphonies 2, 3 'Eroica', 4, 5, 6 'Pastoral', 7 and 8, Piano Concertos 4 and 5 'Emperor', the Violin Concerto, piano sonatas, the three Rasumovsky String Quartets, the opera Fidelio, and many other works.

Thomas Alva 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.What many people are not aware of, is the fact that Edison had had hearing problems from childhood on. This hearing loss caused him some difficulty in school. In addition, he reportedly lost more of his hearing, becoming technically deaf, in his early teens. While as an inventor Edison was involved with several things, ironically one of them was motion picture development. It is ironic that a person with hearing loss would have been so involved in the development of an entertainment mode that has largely been inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing for so many years.