Braille’s slow acceptance is testament to fear of diminished influence and stubborn egos. Teachers couldn’t read braille and feared job loss; educators championed their own systems, despite limitations obvious to any blind reader.
Eventually, braille supplanted embossed languages, including Boston Line Type and New York Point, and is the primary language of the world’s 180 million blind people.
Louis Braille Brings Literacy to the Blind
1809: Louis Braille born in Coupvary, France. He is blinded at age three after stabbing his eye with a serpette (a slender, curved knife) in his father’s harness shop.
1819: Braille enters the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris.
1821: Braille experiments with “night writing,” a raised-dot system developed for the French military by M. Charles Barbier. Intended for secret nighttime communications, night writing used a 12-dot cell. Braille perceived its main flaw – the inability of fingertips to feel all the dots at once – and begins modifying a new system around a six-dot cell.
1829: Braille publishes his six-cell code, including a separate code for musical notations.
1832: Samuel Gridley Howe, superintendent of the New England Asylum for the Blind (now the Perkins School for the Blind), develops Boston Line Type based on letter shapes, after observing European blind education practices.
1835: The Acts of the Apostles becomes the first book embossed using Boston Line Type.
Adoption of Braille is Slow
1840: Use of braille temporarily banned by Royal Institution director Pierre Dufau.
1843: Pierre Foucault builds the raphigraph (needle writer), a machine for writing Roman letters using Braille's decapoint system. The machine, awarded a platinum medal from the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, is considered the first dot-matrix printer.
1852: Louis Braille dies in Coupvray at 43.
1854: The Missouri School for the Blind adopts the use of braille after Dr. Simon Pollak observes its use in Europe.
“War of the Dots” Begins
1868: British and Foreign Blind Association founded; its book publishing sparks braille’s widespread use. William Bell Wait publishes his revised raised dot system, New York Point.
1871: American Association of Instructors of the Blind (AAIB) endorses New York Point and recommends its use in all United States schools for the blind.
1892: Dissatisfied with New York Point, AAIB-member school superintendents adopt Modified braille (developed by Joel W. Smith in 1878 and later renamed American Braille) despite no published books in that format. Frank H. Hall, superintendent of the Illinois School for the Blind, demonstrates his “braille stereotypemaker,” the first braillewriter, enabling blind persons to write up to 100 words per minute.
1893: In response to Hall’s braillewriter, William Bell Wait develops the Kleidograph, extending New York Point’s viability another 20 years.
The End of New York Point
1909: The New York Board of Education selects American braille over New York Point following contentious public hearings to decide which system to adopt in its public schools. New York Point’s general lack of capitals, hyphens, and apostrophes, which made it seem less literate than braille, was a deciding factor.
1916: Research by the Commission on Uniform Type confirms braille’s greater reach over New York Point in both users and published materials.
1918: The AAIB endorses the work of the Commission on Uniform Type, adopting British braille for mathematical and chemical notations.
1932: English-speaking nations accept uniform braille code; Spanish-speaking nations follow in 1951.
1951: David Abraham creates the Perkins Brailler, which offers interpoint (two-sided) embossing, making braillewriting easier for students and teachers.
1991: Braille Authority of North America and the International Council on English Braille embark on an as yet unattained Unified English Braille Code.
Braille’s slow acceptance epitomizes human nature at its best and worst: the genius whose gifts, freely shared, open new worlds, and administrators whose myopic self-importance sought to close them.
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