Louis Braille

  
Language  
Communication 
Timeline 
Braille
Sight Defects

 
The Story of Louis Braille 
The "discovery" of braille 
Louis Braille & the Braille System  
A biography and a guide to get you started with braille.

Louis (pronounced "LOO-ee", not "LOO-is") Braille was born on January 4th, 1809, in the village of Coupvray (50 km East of Paris, France). His parents were Simon René Braille (a saddler), and Monique Baron (the daughter of a farm worker). He had two older sisters and a brother — the youngest of these was 11 years older than him, but Louis was reputedly his father's favourite child. 

Louis was bright and inquisitive, and in 1812, at the age of three, was playing in his father's workshop. He was using an awl and trying to imitate his father. Somehow, he accidentally pierced his eye with the instrument. He was looked after with great care, but the eye was not surgically removed, and became infected. This infection spread to his other eye, and Louis became completely, permanently blind. Like most children blinded before the age of six, Louis could not remember any specific images. 

He went to school in the village with his friends, and though he could not read, write, or see, he soon advanced to the top of the class, much to everyone's surprise. Louis' father decided that this would not be enough, however, and when his son was nine wrote to the Minister of the Interior. He nominated Louis to attend l'Institution Royal des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris, and he was enrolled at age ten. One of the first things Louis did when he got to the school was to ask if there were any books for blind people to read. There were, but they were made of huge raised letters, a system developed by Valentin Haüx, the school's founder. The books were big, bulky, and expensive. The school had just 14. By the time you deciphered a sentence, you would forget how it began. Louis thought that there must be a better way to read. 

Louis learned how to play the cello and the organ. He was very talented, and played the organ in churches all over Paris. This was a useful source of income. At the school, the boys were also taught to cane chairs and make slippers. They went for weekly walks in the park, tied together by a rope. Boys who misbehaved were beaten, locked up, or given stale bread and water. This, however was common at the time. The school was also very dark, damp, and dirty. 

The first person to develop a system of raised-dot printing was Charles Barbier de la Serre, an artillery officer. He cut out writing with a knife (making copies easy). He called his system sonography, but more informally "Night Writing" because its purpose was for soldiers to pass messages back and forth at night without requiring lights to read by (which provided targets for enemy soldiers). The system was clumsy, based on sounds and using a 12-dot cell. The army rejected the system because it was too complicated for the soldiers to learn. Barbier brought the system to the school for the blind when Louis was 12. He saw the problems with the system, but he also saw the potential. On vacation at his parents' home, he was in his father's workshop and noticed an awl. He realized he could make raised dots in paper, and use them to form his letters. The very tool that had blinded him opened up new doors on the world for Louis and all blind people. He worked for three years at simplifying a 6-dot system based on spelling, and had developed what we now call braille by the age of fifteen. He later evolved the system for numbers and music.  

In 1827, the first book was published in Braille, and in 1829 Louis wrote Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Song by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged by Them. The system didn't catch on at first, though. Most of the sighted people didn't understand the benefits of the braille system, and one teacher at Louis' school even banned it. This however, encouraged children even more, and they learned braille in secret. They could now write, too, using a stylus to make dots. 
 
Death 

Louis became a teacher at the school, and was respected and loved by his students. However, at age 26 he began to show the first symptoms of tuberculosis , almost certainly brought on by the condition of the school. He began to hemorrhage  in December of 1851 and died on January 26th, 1852, at the age of 46. 

It seemed that the system he'd worked so hard on would die with him, but somehow people managed to keep it alive. It grew and grew in usage and form, and now the braille system is used in virtually every country of the world. It has been modified for use in almost all languages. 

Finally, in 1952, on the 100th anniversary of his death, Louis' body was moved to the Pantheon (the home of national heroes) in Paris in recognition of his contribution to improve the quality of life of the blind.