A Biography of Louis Braille
His Raised-Dot Language System Brought Literacy to the Blind
Sep 21, 2008
Louis Braille was only 16 when he developed the world's first binary encoding scheme to represent written language. He saw that raised dots were easier to decipher than the embossed shapes of print letters then in use.
Blind students agreed immediately; educators needed a century to finally accept braille’s simple elegance.
Braille’s Early Life
Braille was born in Coupvray, France in 1809. At age three, in his father’s harness shop, he pushed a serpette (a curved knife) through a piece of leather blinding his right eye and eventually lost sight in the left due to sympathetic ophthalmia. In his biography, Louis Braille: A Touch of Genius (National Braille Press, 2006), Michael Mellor notes that the right eye’s immediate removal might have saved the left.
Braille learned letters by touch on an alphabet of upholstery nails driven into a board. He was the most intelligent student in his village, but lacked the tools and texts needed to read and write. When he was 10, his parents sent him to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris 25 miles away.
At his new school, Braille excelled at every subject, became an accomplished cellist and organist playing at cathedrals around Paris, and was the only student to master touch reading of raised letters in the school’s library of embossed books. No tools existed that enabled the blind to write.
Braille began to create a new language in 1821 after experimenting with “night writing,” a coded system built on a 12-raised-dot cell developed for the French Army by Charles Barbier for communicating silently in the dark. After the army rejected it, Barbier thought it might find use among the blind.
He was right. Braille picked it up quickly ("Louis Braille," S. Sydenham, Kidcyber.com, 2003) and saw its limitations: a 12-dot cell too large for a fingertip to read, and a complicated phonetic code. Braille shrunk the cell to six dots, each corresponding to letters instead of sounds. Raising one or more of the six dots offered 63 possible formations, enough to represent all letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. He later extended his system to include math and music notations.
Braille Invents Dot Matrix Printing
Though braille is symbolic (i.e. dot formations don’t resemble printed letters), Braille knew letter shapes and noticed that most can be visually represented with a four-dot square with three-dot extensions above or below. This observation inspired him to conceive the raphigraph (needle writer), a device that would enable blind people to write in regular print. Braille’s friend, Pierre Foucault, built a prototype in 1843 that mechanized Braille’s concept, giving the world dot matrix printing. The first typewriter was still 27 years away.
In 1833, Braille was promoted to teacher at the Institution, which gave him an annual salary of 300 francs and a silk uniform with gilt palm leaves on the lapels that he wore proudly about town or when playing the church organ.
In 1843, Braille moved into the new Institut National des Jeune Aveugles where he taught till 1852, when he died of tuberculosis at age 43. He was buried in the Coupvray village cemetery. A century later, his body was re-interred in the Pantheon in Paris, while his miraculous hands remained in Coupvray, preserved in a marble urn atop his grave.
Despite its practicality and ease of use, Braille’s system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. Widespread publication of braille books did not begin until 1868 and competing raised-dot systems championed by various educators, schools, and regions, with input rarely sought from blind readers, continued well into the 20th Century.
The prolonged “War of Dots” underscores Braille’s genius. In an age where blind people either made rope or begged, Braille’s system afforded genuine literacy (the ability to read, write, and read what you have written) that is now the primary language for the world’s 180 million blind people.
 |
