Bell directed them to Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind, where they met recent graduate Anne Sullivan, the miracle-working tutor who would teach Helen to write, speak and read Braille. In 1887, Captain Arthur Keller traveled from Alabama to meet with Bell in order to seek help for his 6-year-old daughter, Helen, who had become blind and mute at the age of 19 months, possibly from scarlet fever. In spite of gaining fame as the inventor of the telephone, Bell continued his lifelong work to help the hearing impaired. Bell connected Helen Keller with Annie Sullivan. After Garfield’s death on September 19, the bullet was found to be on his left side.

Bell was twice summoned to Garfield’s White House bedside with his machine, but his “induction balance” failed to locate the bullet, in part due to interference caused by steel wires in the bed mattress and the president’s chief physician only permitting a search of the right side of the president’s body where he was convinced the bullet was lodged.

Believing that “science should be able to discover some less barbarous method” for locating the bullet, Bell developed an electromagnetic machine that he tested on Civil War veterans who still had bullets lodged in their bodies. In the weeks that followed the July 2, 1881, shooting of President James Garfield, the chief executive’s condition worsened as doctors made repeated probes with unsterilized fingers and instruments in order to find the location of one of the bullets. Alexander Graham Bell and assistant use an electrical detector to find a bullet inside President James Garfield.

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