Where did THE DOLPHIN HOUSE come from?

As a teenager, I remember reading about Margaret Howe’s work to teach Peter, an adolescent male dolphin, to speak English. Back in the 1960s, she lived for months with Peter in a partially flooded apartment with the furniture hanging on chains from the ceiling. She slept on a bed over the water, her foot hanging off the side of the bed, with Peter sucking on her toe as a pacifier to sleep. During the day, she tried to teach him to say the alphabet and her name.

This was part of John Lilly’s dolphin research center in St. Thomas. Lilly performed brain research on the dolphins. He was celebrated as a CalTech neuroscientist and inventor, as a philosopher and counter-cultural thinker who got high with Timothy Leary.

During this era just after Sputnik, Lilly wanted to figure out how to communicate with extraterrestrials, through learning how to communicate with dolphins —intelligent creatures who floated in a watery world and breathed through the back of their heads.

I was fascinated with this story as a teenager, but even at the time, I remember thinking there was so much to the story not being told. This was a story that had been explained almost exclusively from a man’s perspective, a man who was willing to operate on the brains of dolphins. It had not been told not from the perspective of Howe or Peter.

I wondered how to re-imagine the basic events now with a modern perspective, explaining with fictional characters, what it might have felt like to be a woman performing innovative research in 1965, working in a man’s field, living with a dolphin in that watery apartment for months.

Do dolphins have language? 

Dolphins can make and hear a much wider range of sound than humans can. In terms of what is known about their capabilities with language, they have “signature whistles,” sounds that are used only around certain individuals. Researchers believe these whistles might be akin to names.

Beyond that, human researchers have had a hard time learning more about dolphin’s language, since underwater they cannot distinguish where the sounds are coming from, making it difficult to associate a specific sound with a specific individual or action.

Did Peter learn to speak English?

Dolphins create sound through their blowholes, not their mouths.  Thus, they have no lips, tongue or teeth to make the sounds we commonly use in English.

During that summer back in 1965, living in a watery apartment with Peter, Margaret worked with him for hours each day, trying to teach him the alphabet and her name.  He tried very hard to speak.  Peter taught himself to roll his blowhole in and out of the water, using the water as a type of lips. He would swim to a separate room from Margaret and stare into a mirror, watching his blowhole while he tried to make the noises.  He seemed to not want her to see his attempts.  

It’s possible he was so motivated to talk because dolphins are such social creatures and Peter had no one else to communicate with other than Margaret.  On the other hand, the local vet said he believed that Peter was in love with Margaret.

In the end, Peter could make a reasonable approximation of the name “Margaret,” sounding a little like a drunk human gargling her name.