Today
is the Birthday of Louis Braille. Braille? That name sounds familiar …
Louis Braille was a teacher and advocate of the
blind in France
in the early 1800s. He was blinded
himself at the age of 3 by an accident in his father’s leather shop, but despite
this handicap, he excelled when his father sent him to school with sighted
children. He was also a gifted musician,
learning to play the cello and organ at an early age. While attending the National Institute of
Blind Youth, he was inspired by a lecture he heard about a new system of
embossed symbols, called sonography, invented by Captain Charles Barbier
[although some say that Braille learned about the Barbier system in a newspaper
account]. Barbier’s system was a method
for soldiers to communicate silently during wartime field operations using dots and dashes embossed on leather.
Braille’s
experiments and refinements of an embossing technique resulted in a six-dot code
based on the letters of the alphabet that could be felt with the
finger-tips. After working with the
number and placement of the dots, Braille was able to code not only letters,
but also common words, symbols, and mathematical and musical notations that
could be quickly read, stored compactly and useful for both reading and writing.
Braille
was only twenty when he published his coding system. His second expanded system was demonstrated
at the Paris Exposition of Industry in 1834 and received praise of the French
King, Louis Philippe. The system was not
well-received though by sighted instructors of the blind and school board
members who feared the loss of their jobs to a well-educated blind populace and
continued to advocate for the existing embossed-letter system. That embossed-letter system used heavy paper
with raised Latin letters that students found to be cumbersome and slow to read
and was in no way suitable for writing.
Braille
was an admired and respected musician and teacher at the National Institute of
Blind Youth when he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis. One of his former students, a blind musician,
let the audience know after her performance in Paris that she had learned using the Braille
system. Renewed interest in the system
grew and persistent advocating by blind students resulted in a revival of the
system, but it was still not fully accepted until 1854, two years after
Braille’s death.
Braille’s
revolutionary invention has now been adapted for a multitude of languages and
is now in use world-wide. It has been
modified periodically and the newest innovations include Braille computer
terminals, a Braille email delivery service and further developments in
mathematical and scientific notations.
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| Braille's childhood home in Coupvray |
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