Samuel Heinicke

[1] Heinicke promoted a chiefly oral/aural method of instruction, though he did use some form of a manual alphabet.

He believed a spoken language to be indispensable to a proper education, and that it formed the basis for reasoning and intellectual thought.

He died before his contributions to Deaf education became widespread, but John Baptist Graser (1766–1841) and Friedrich Moritz Hill [de; sv] (1805–1874) continued to espouse the oral method.

In 1768, when living in Hamburg, he successfully taught a deaf boy to talk, following the methods prescribed by Amman in his book Surdus loquens, but improving on them.

[1] Recalled to his own country by the elector of Saxony, he opened the first deaf institution in Leipzig, Germany, in 1778.