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Page where oral instruction was espoused and practiced. The Braidwoods had always been secretive about their methods the elder
Braidwood had once offered to publicize his methods only if he were rewarded financially by the European nobility. Gallaudet was unable to gain permission to study with the Braidwood family. At about the same time, he accidentally encountered the
Abbé Sicard, director of the Royal Institution for the Deaf in Paris, where the sign language that had been developed by the school's founder, Charles-Michel de l'Épée, "the father of the Deaf" was being used to teach deaf students. Sicard had traveled to England from Paris to exhibit the accomplishments of his two star pupils, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc. Sicard, like his predecessor, the Abbé de l'Épée, was willing to share his methods of instruction with others.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet traveled to Paris and began to observe and participate in the instruction the deaf pupils were receiving at the school. He wrote to Cogswell with great enthusiasm "I have already learned the signs of most of the tenses of the verbs in all their moods and in all their varieties . . . . Don't be alarmed at this system of signs. A great deal of it is truly valuable and will very much accelerate the progress of my scholars" After only a few months, Gallaudet (who was already homesick) was convinced that the French method of manual signing was the one he wanted to bring back to the United States. As a result, rather than remain in Paris to continue his studies and training,
he persuaded Laurent Clerc to return with him to Hartford to help establish the first school for deaf pupils in the United States.
The school officially opened in 1817 and was called The American Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb
Persons. (Today it is known as the American School for the Deaf) Alice Cogswell was registered as the first pupil she was soon joined by and became a close friend of nineteen-year-old Sophia Fowler, who would become Gallaudet's wife four years later.
The Connecticut legislature appropriated funds for the school, and soon after, the United States granted a acre site to the school. Student enrollment rose steadily in 1819 the

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